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German Atrocities 

Their Nature and Philosophy 



By Newell Dwight Hillis 



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German Atrocities 

Their Nature and Philosophy 



Studies in Belgium and France 
During July and August of ipi/ 



By 
NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 



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Foreword 

THESE inquiries into German atrocities 
were begun in the latter part of Sep- 
tember, 1914. Friends who had escaped from 
Belgium during the latter part of August 
brought stories of German frightfulness that 
filled all hearers with horror. Being un- 
willing to accept their testimony without 
further evidence, I began a careful research, 
collecting letters, magazine articles, testi- 
mony of eye-witnesses, books, photographs, 
reports of the various commissions, by former 
Ambassador Bryce and Professor Toynbee, 
with those of the Commissions of Belgium, 
France, Poland, Serbia and Armenia. Last 
May, in the interest of the first Liberty 
Loan, Mr. Lawrence Chamberlain and I 
made a tour of eighteen states, speaking in 
some thirty-five cities, and often giving two, 
three and even five addresses in a single day. 
Everywhere during that tour we found pub- 
lic men raising the question, " What about 
the German atrocities ? Do they not rep- 

7 



Foreword 

resent falsehoods invented by the enemy 
states ? " 

In the belief that this question was vital 
to the success of the second and all subse- 
quent Liberty Loans, and for the full awak- 
ening of the American people, at the request 
of several bankers of New York, with Mr. 
Chamberlain I sailed for France late in 
June, and returned to this country in Sep- 
tember. As guests of the British and French 
governments we had every opportunity of 
visiting the devastated regions of Belgium 
and France, and those long journeys through 
the ruined farms, villages and cities brought 
the opportunity of conversing with hundreds 
of victims of German cruelty, who gave us 
their testimony on the very spots where the 
atrocities had been committed. At the re- 
quest of Henry M. and W. C. Leland of 
Detroit, and Eichard H. Edmonds of Balti- 
more, I have brought together this simple 
record of the bare facts that came under our 
own personal scrutiny. In the nature of the 
case, many atrocities that were carefully 
studied cannot be presented in this report 
because the witnesses reasonably fear that 
their families, just behind the German lines, 
might be made to suffer were their testi- 

8 



Foreword 

mony to become known. It should be added 
that Mr. Chamberlain will shortly make his 
report from the view-point of the financier 
and investigator of industrial conditions in 
Belgium and France. 

The first two of the following chapters 
embody the substance of addresses given in 
Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washing- 
ton, Chicago, Indianapolis, and some thirty 
other cities during October, 19 17, in connec- 
tion with the Second Liberty Loan. The 
third substantially presents views of ad- 
dresses in Cincinnati, Louisville, New Or- 
leans, Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, 
Seattle, Salt Lake City, Butte, Denver, and 
thirty other cities during the First Liberty 
Loan. 

K D. H. 

Brooklyn , N. T., January y igi8. 



Contents 

I. German Atrocities, Their Nature and 

Philosophy . . . . 13 

II. The Pan-German Empire Scheme, for 

Which Germany Lost Her Soul . 63 

III. What the United States and Her 

Allies are Fighting For . . 101 

IV. Astounding Claims and Records From 

German Sources . . . .141 

V. Illustrations Portraying German 

Atrocities . . . . .161 



II 



German Atrocities, Their Nature 
and Philosophy 



Did the Kaiser's Charge Render the Later 

Atrocities Inevitable ? 

When Charles IX of France was urged to kill 
Coligny, he finally consented, in these words, 
"Assassinate Admiral Coligny, but leave not a 
Huguenot alive in France to reproach me." That 
first assassination made the later atrocities inevi- 
table. When the Kaiser and his War Staff de- 
termined to kill, they delayed for a time, but 
once their hands were dripping with blood, the 
first massacres made it necessary to go on, and kill 
the Belgians and Frenchmen who had witnessed 
the crimes. So came the unspeakable atrocities 
of the Germans. 

"Take heed that ye offend not against one of 
my little ones. If any man offend against one 
of my little ones, it were better for him that a 
millstone were hanged about his neck, and that 
he were drowned in the depths of the sea." — The 
Gospel of Matthew (Jesus Christ). 



German Atrocities, Their Nature 
and Philosophy 

ALL Americans who have journeyed 
through Belgium and France this 
year have returned home permanently sad- 
dened men. German cruelty has cut a 
bloody gash in the heart, and while there 
are Dakin solutions that heal wounds in the 
arms and legs, there is no medicine that can 
heal the wounds in the heart. Some Ger- 
man-Americans still insist that the alleged 
German atrocities represent English lies, Bel- 
gian hypocrisies and French delusions, but 
all possibility of evasion or denial has been 
destroyed. Modern courts are satisfied with 
two forms of testimony, but the German 
atrocities are evidenced by five kinds of 
indubitable proof. There is the testimony 
of men and women telling what their own 
eyes have seen, and their own ears have 
heard,— that is a high form of evidence. 

15 



German Atrocities 

There is the testimony of little children, 
children too innocent to invent what they 
j are old enough to describe. Legal authori- 
ties tell us that because children are unpreju- 
l diced their testimony is the highest form of 
I proof known to modern courts. Third, there 
is the testimony of the photograph, — photo- 
graphs taken often before the massacred 
bodies had grown cold, and immediately 
after the German retreat from the town 
they had pillaged. The sunbeams move in 
straight lines ; they tell no lies ; they can- 
not be bribed; they have no prejudice for 
or against the Germans. No one can look 
at the hundreds of photographs of mutilated 
bodies without confessing that the sunlight, 
like a recording angel, has given a damning 
testimony that cannot be gainsaid by the 
monsters who not only killed men who de- 
fended the honour of their wives, but hacked 
these young husbands into shreds, mutilating 
the body in ways that can only be men- 
tioned by men to men and in whispered 
tones. 

The Germans Convict Themselves 
Another form of proof is found in the 
journals and diaries of the German soldiers. 

16 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

The German has climbed into the witness 
stand, and given conclusive testimony against 
himself. Had his statements been made by 
Belgians, French or English, we would have 
denied or questioned the words, but when 
diaries have been taken from the dead bodies 
of German soldiers, and when these different 
journals contain substantially the same state- 
ments as to the atrocities committed at a 
given day in a given town, it becomes im- 
possible for an American student to deny 
the daily records of German soldiers, with 
the confession of deeds committed sometimes 
by their fellows, sometimes by themselves. 
There is also the testimony of mutilated 
bodies that have been preserved in certain 
morgues against the day of judgment when 
arbitrators will behold the proof, hear the 
witnesses, and weigh the guilt of the Ger- 
mans. The Day of Judgment is coming 
when these witnesses will rise literally from 
the grave and indict the German Kaiser and 
his War Staff for atrocities that are the 
logical and inevitable result of the ceaseless 
drill of their officers and privates in the 
science of murder, as a method of breaking 
down the nervous resources of the armed 
soldiers of Belgium and France. 



German Atrocities 

Overwhelming Evidence 
No horrors in history are so overwhelm- 
ingly evidenced as the German atrocities. 
The nature, the number, and the extent of 
their crimes have been documented more 
thoroughly than the scalpings of settlers by 
Sioux Indians, the horrors of the Black Hole 
of Calcutta, or the cruelties of the Spanish 
Inquisition. No American to-day can cross 
the threshold of Belgium or Northern France, 
Poland or Serbia, without recalling the words 
that Dante saw above the gate of Hell : 
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." 
Not since Judas and his fellow conspirators 
crucified Jesus has there been a ruler, a 
War Staff or an army, that has deliberately 
revived the cross, as an instrument of torture, 
to further the ends of military efficiency. 
The Germans have literally fulfilled the 
Kaiser's charge in 1899, and reproduced in 
1914, upon various cards for the Kaiser's 
soldiers : " You will take no prisoners ; you 
will show no mercy ; you will give no quar- 
ter ; you will make yourselves as terrible as 
the Huns under Attila." All scholars know 
that the Kaiser was referring to Attila's 
well-known motto, " Where my feet fall, let 
grass not grow for a hundred years." 

18 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

A Catalogue of Crimes 
The catalogue of German atrocities, now 
documented, in legal reports, with the ac- 
companying photographs, preserved in the 
Department of Justice of the various na- 
tions, makes up the blackest page in human 
history. Long days and nights spent over 
the reports in the various capitals, and in 
courts of justice, journeys to and fro amid 
the ruined villages along a battle front six 
hundred miles in length, leave the head sick 
and the heart faint. The traveller would 
become utterly hopeless and broken-hearted, 
and give himself up to black despair, were it 
not that everything that German savagery 
has done to destroy one's faith in the divine 
origin of the human soul has been more 
than recovered by the gentleness, the self- 
sacrifice, the fortitude, the sympathy, the 
heroism of the British, the Belgians, and the 
French. The Germans have at last com- 
pelled all unprejudiced minds to recognize 
the atrocity as the German notion of scien- 
tific efficiency. It is not by chance that 
the first atrocities were begun on practically 
the same day, August 17th, of 1914, and 
ended about September 19th, and along a 
line extending from the English Channel to 

19 



German Atrocities 

the Swiss frontier, just as the murders and 
mutilations, the rapes and the pillaging be- 
gan and ended at the same time in Poland, 
Kumania and Serbia, and are now being 
repeated in more malignant forms in North- 
eastern Italy. 

These Hoeeoes Do Not Eepeesent 
Deunkenkess 

Nor were these atrocities committed in 
moods of drunkenness, hours of anger, nor 
by the occasional degenerate, like Jack the 
Eipper of Whitechapel Koad. Allen White 
and Arnold Toynbee are doubtless right in 
asserting that most of the attacks upon 
little girls and young women were made 
by German officers, nevertheless, all must 
confess that the German soldiers were not 
less culpable, as they pillaged the land, 
guided by the deliberate, cold, precise, 
scientific, ordered policy of German fright- 
fulness. 

The story of German occupancy of Bel- 
gium and France is a long, black story of 
unspeakable crimes. These brigands broke 
into banks, looted factories, pillaged houses, 
burned the farmers' machinery, chopped 
down orchards and vineyards. In the face 

20 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

of their newly-signed treaties with the Allied 
nations, pledging the safeguarding of all 
buildings dedicated to education and relig- 
ion, with the lives and property of non- 
combatants, the Germans made their treaties 
mere scraps of paper, sneered at the most 
solemn obligations given by men to men, 
burned cathedrals, colleges and libraries, 
mutilated old men and women, violated 
little children, nailed a child to a farmer's 
barn door upon which they found a calf skin 
drying in the sun, and beneath wrote the 
word "zwei." They crucified Canadian 
officers and Roman Catholic nuns. They 
bombed hospitals and Red Cross buildings. 
They thrust women and little children be- 
tween themselves and the Belgian and 
French soldiers defending their native land. 
The affidavits, photographs, and mutilated 
bodies are witnesses that destroy forever the 
last shred of doubt and incredulity. For 
men who are open to testimony, the German 
atrocities are more surely established than 
any of the hideous cruelties recorded in his- 
tory. Now, for the first time, wildest sav- 
agery has been reduced to a science, and 
damned into existence under the name of 
German efficiency. 

21 



German Atrocities 

The Philosophy of the German 
Atrocities 

At the beginning of the war the Ameri- 
can people questioned all these alleged 
horrors, saying that all war is hell, and 
abuses are common to all armies. Ameri- 
cans looked upon these alleged abominations 
as being intellectually absurd and morally 
monstrous, and therefore we doubted the 
evidence. But at last all alike perceive that 
the German war-deeds differ from the usual 
abuses of war, as a cunning fiend differs from 
a drunken man. Germany believes in mili- 
tarism, in forty-two centimeter guns, in sub- 
marines, in liquid fire and poisoned gases. 
This republic and our Allies believe in 
the manufacture of souls of good quality. 
We believe in schools, colleges, libraries, 
churches, factories, banks, fruitful fields and 
a self-sufficing, intelligent and moral man- 
hood. From the Allied view-point, the very 
thought of Germany's asking other nations 
to produce property while once in a genera- 
tion, with her standing army, she goes forth 
to pillage and loot the wealth that industri- 
ous French or Belgians have created, is for 
us a monstrous thought. From the German 
view-point, however, atrocities represent 

22 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

military efficiency. Just as the German 
War Staff perfected in advance rifles and 
cannon as legitimate warfare, so they pre- 
pared in advance certain outrages from 
which they expected the greatest possible 
results, in terms of conquered territory 

The German Handbook of Mili- 
tary Tactics 

That their officers and soldiers might 
understand in advance the use of the atrocity 
as a military instrument, the General Staff 
of the German army, in 1902, published a 
handbook of military tactics, entitled " The 
Laws of War on Land." This handbook 
sets forth a deliberate system of atrocity, 
and prepares the way for every species of 
villainy. In clear and unmistakable lan- 
guage, the War Staff presents principles that 
embody the ideas of savages. Witness the 
statements on page 35 : " By steeping him- 
self in military history an officer will be able 
to guard himself against excessive humani- 
tarian notions. It will teach him that 
certain severities are indispensable to war. 
What is permissible includes every means 
without which the object of the war cannot 
be attained." Witness also the savagery 

23 



German Atrocities 

outlined on page 52: "A war conducted 
with energy cannot be directed merely 
against the combatants of the enemy states 
and the positions they occupy, but it will 
and must in like manner seek to destroy the 
total intellectual and material resources of 
the latter. Humanitarian claims, — such as 
the protection of men's lives and their prop- 
erty, can be taken into consideration only 
in so far as the nature and object of the 
war will permit." Their Handbook of 
Military Tactics is, therefore, nothing other 
than the science of atrocity. With an army 
steeped in these vicious teachings, with pri- 
vate soldiers trained by this handbook that 
teaches crime as an art, and with the ex- 
hortation of their Kaiser to make themselves 
as terrible as the Huns under Attila, the rape 
of Belgium, the crucifixion of Poland, and 
the assassination of Northern France were 
logical and inevitable results. 

The German Motive for Massacre an 
Overwhelming One 

To-day, Germans find it difficult to forgive 
Bethmann-Hollweg for his confessions when, 
at the beginning of the war, he acknowledged 
they were committing a wrong against Bel- 

24 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

gium, that their designs made necessary, 
by " hacking the way through." We now 
know that the motive of the Kaiser and his 
"War Staff for massacring Belgium was an 
overwhelming motive. They had staked 
everything upon a short war. " Brussels in 
one week, Paris in two weeks, London in two 
months," — that was the programme. The 
stubborn opposition of the Belgian army, 
standing on a frontier whose sanctity the 
Kaiser, by the most solemn treaties, had just 
pledged himself to safeguard, stalled the 
German military machine, made impossible 
a crushing victory over France, and threat- 
ened their dreams of a series of hurricane 
victories over England. 

Then the German War Staff put into 
operation the instructions to " frightfulness " 
against aged men and women, girls and 
little children. Should the average Ameri- 
can return home at night to find that his 
wife and children had been massacred and 
mutilated during his absence, he would not 
go to the office on the following morning. 
The horror of " a great darkness " would fall 
upon him, the tool would drop from his hand, 
and weeks would pass before he could steel 
his hand to the accustomed task. Now the 

25 



German Atrocities 

German "War Staff fully realized the true 
value of the atrocity as a military instrument. 
Their soldiers ran no risk in killing aged 
men or raping young girls, but they hoped 
that when the news of their crimes reached 
the armed opponent, the atrocity commit- 
ted upon his wife or child would break his 
nerve, and leave him helpless to fight. It 
took only three and a half weeks to spread 
the black wave of terror and f rightfulness 
over Belgium, in order to break the nerve 
forces of the Belgian army. 

The Number of Atrocities 
The full extent of this can never be 
known. More than one hundred thousand 
people are simply reported as "missing," 
other multitudes were burned or thrown into 
pits. Only in towns from which the German 
armies hurriedly retreated were inquests pos- 
sible, and in those towns affidavits were pre- 
pared and photographs of the mutilated bod- 
ies taken. The fact that these atrocities all 
along the battle line began on practically the 
same day in August and ended on about the 
same day in September does not prove, but 
does suggest plan and prearrangement. After 
the German troops had passed through, it 

26 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

became possible for the village school-teacher, 
priest or banker, the aged women and the 
children who had escaped to creep out of 
pits, the caves in the fields, or the edge of 
the woods, where they had been hiding, and 
return to survey the scene of desolation be- 
hind them. In those towns where the sol- 
diers encountered no opposition by the inhab- 
itants, for the reason that there were no men 
left in the village, the Germans speedily 
wrought their devastation and departed. 
Then the French authorities hurried forward 
their authorized representatives, inquests were 
held, photographs taken of the mutilated 
bodies, and testimony taken and sent to the 
Department of Justice. What took place in 
, those Belgian towns and cities that are still 
in German hands will never be known until 
the German officers and soldiers stand before 
the Great Judgment Throne and give their 
account unto God. 

The German War Staff's Eeport Ac- 
knowledges Their Atrocities 

The value of the atrocity as a military instru- 
ment for sending the simoom of terror across 
the land is set forth in scores of diaries taken 
from the dead bodies of German soldiers, and 

27 



German Atrocities 

also from the occasional reports of German 
officers to the War Staff, that were printed 
in Berlin and found their way into this coun- 
try by way of Denmark, Norway or Sweden. 
In the " summarizing report by the Gen- 
eral War Staff," published December 31, 
1914, the German chief says in explanation 
of the Belgian campaign : " The need of the 
German army to push through Belgium was 
imperative. Our starting point was that the 
tactical object of the Twelfth Corps was to 
cross the Meuse with speed. To at once 
overcome the opposition of the inhabitants 
was a military necessity, and something to be 
striven for in every way." And what does 
" every way " mean ? Let the German Staff 
themselves answer. " The flourishing town 
of Dinant with its suburbs was burnt, and 
made a heap of ruins, and a large number of 
Belgian lives lost." " About 220 inhabitants 
were then shot, and the village was burned. 
Just now, six o'clock in the afternoon, the 
crossing of the Meuse begins near Dinant ; 
all the suburbs, chateaux and houses were 
burned down during this night. It was a 
beautiful sight to see the villages burning all 
around us in the distance." " The town ap- 
peared to be perfectly peaceful, nevertheless, 

28 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

for the sake of security, a number of the in- 
habitants were made prisoners by the grena- 
diers." " Later, we decided to assemble all 
the male hostages against the garden wall, 
where we shot them." 

Hundreds of witnesses called in one town, 

after the Germans had passed on, show 

that the German officers and soldiers were 

engaged in one horrible orgy of pillage, 

drunkenness, lust and murder. They began 

by breaking open all wine cellars and soon 

the officers went reeling and staggering 

through the streets, firing their revolvers into 

the windows of houses and stores. They 

blasted the safes open with dynamite. They 

carried goods from the shelves to the freight 

trains, and as fast as the town was pillaged, 

burned the houses. During four days they 

looted and burned twelve hundred houses, 

stores, factories, schools and churches. They 

left lying on the ground seven hundred dead 

bodies, chiefly women and children. Two 

trains laden with the men and women who 

were strong enough to work were carried off 

to Germany. All the manufactories where 

the artisan class were wont to work were 

systematically destroyed. Marching away 

from towns that were blazing furnaces, the 

29 



German Atrocities 

German soldiers drove in advance a long line 
of women and children, with a few aged 
men, and used them as screens behind which 
they could march into the next town that 
was to be looted. 

The Looting of Louvain 
In justifying the use of the atrocity as a 
military instrument more efficient in break- 
ing down the morale of the Belgian army 
than cannon and liquid fire could possibly be, 
a German army officer's letter uses these 
words : " The ruthless use of severities upon 
the civilians has now succeeded in scattering 
the wretched Belgian army." But concern- 
ing what atrocity is this officer writing ? He 
wrote these words at the end of the third 
day, after the Germans had pillaged Louvain, 
thus serving notice on all the Belgian and 
French cities, rich in historic monuments, 
libraries, galleries, cathedrals, and art treas- 
ures, that unless they immediately surren- 
dered, their whole city would be ruined. 

And ruined after what manner ? Let Car- 
dinal Mercier, the Primate of Belgium, tell 
the story. " At Louvain the third part of 
the city has been destroyed ; one thousand 
and seventy-four dwellings have disappeared ; 

30 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

in addition, in the suburbs Kesselloo, Herent 
and Herberle, one thousand, eight hundred 
and twenty-eight houses have been burned. 
In this dear city of Louvain, ever in my 
thoughts, the magnificent church of St. Peter 
will never recover its former splendour. The 
ancient college of St. Ives, the art schools, 
the commercial and consular schools of the 
University ; the old markets ; our rich library, 
with its collections, its unique and unpub- 
lished manuscripts, its archives, its gallery of 
great portraits of illustrious rectors, chancel- 
lors, professors, dating from the time of its 
foundation, which preserved for masters and 
students alike a noble tradition, and were an 
incitement to good work — all this accumula- 
tion of intellectual, historic, and artistic rich- 
ness, the fruit of the labours of five centuries, 
all, all is in ashes." 

Breaking Down the Conscience 
of Their Men 

More terrible still the scheme invented by 
the Kaiser and the War Staff for breaking 
down the conscience of the German soldier. 
The simple peasants of Bavaria, the artisans 
of Saxony, until a generation ago, were 
reared in the morals of Martin Luther. By 

3i 



German Atrocities 

common consent Luther is one of the great 
men of modern times. At a critical moment 
in history he stood forth affirming Paul's 
statement that every man must give an ac- 
count of himself unto God. Since Pope 
Julius could not give his account unto God, 
Martin Luther claimed religious liberty as to 
creed and conduct for himself. Since no 
kaiser could give his account unto God, 
Martin Luther claimed the right of self- 
government, through political democracy. 
Since no philosopher could give his account, 
Luther demanded liberty of thought and 
speech. Carrying out this principle, when 
three hundred years had passed, the free 
nations stood forth clothed with political 
democracy, educational democracy, religious 
democracy, industrial democracy. Just as 
we trace some river back to a spring on the 
mountainside, so we trace these great in- 
stitutions of the Reformation back to Martin 
Luther, who received his ideas from Paul 
and John, from Huss and Savonarola, rein- 
forced by John Calvin and Erasmus. 

The Soldiee's Token , 
But Luther's ethics were the ethics of 
Moses. For several generations the German 

32 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

peasants had been taught that it was crim- 
inal to kill, steal, burn, rape and pillage. 
They knew by heart the words of Jesus, 
" Woe unto him who offends against one of 
my little ones ; it were better for him that a 
millstone were hanged about his neck, and 
that he were drowned in the depths of the 
sea." Plainly the Ten Commandments stood 
squarely in the pathway of the Kaiser's 
ambition. Unless his ambitions for world 
rule were to be defeated, some scheme had 
to be invented to free the German soldier 
from conscience, and break the fetters of 
divine law. 

Therefore the soldier's token was invented. 
It comes under Jesus' special condemnation, 
in that not only the Kaiser and the War 
Staff pursued crime, but "taught men so." 
These tokens are made of stiff cardboard or 
of aluminum. At the top is a portrait of 
Deity as the Kaiser conceives him to be ; in 
one hand the Kaiser's God holds a sickle, for 
the death-harvest. Beneath, the Kaiser and 
his War Staff wrote these words, "Strike 
him dead ; the Day of Judgment will not 
ask you for reasons." 

The soldier might read this : " You can 
slay, pillage, loot, burn, rape, leave thousands 

33 



German Atrocities 

of bodies massacred and mutilated on the 
ground, but remember that your Kaiser and 
your War Staff will stand between you and 
the avenging God, and will see to it that 
the Judge of all the earth makes you no 
trouble on the great day of accounting." 
The Kaiser's God, however, is our Devil. 
For three years the Kaiser has had the Devil 
all mixed up with God, — being unable to 
distinguish between them. Whenever the 
Kaiser uses the word " Gott," Americans 
always substitute the word " Devil." With 
one change the soldier's token is quite ac- 
curate, — " Strike them dead, — old men, girls 
and children, — the Devil will not ask you 
for reasons. Hell and damnation are fully 
satisfied with all you Germans have done." 

Eitel Andeks 
But when the German soldier boy took 
this token out of his pocket, and looked at 
his license to crime, what effect did it have 
upon him? Here is the diary of Eitel 
Anders. It is believed that he belonged to 
the 14th Bavarian regiment. The diary was 
taken from his body upon the battle-field, 
and is similar to hundreds of others. " We 
crossed the bridge over the Maas at 11 : 50 

34 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

in the morning. We then arrived at the 
town of Waendre. When we went out of 
the town, everything was in ruins. In one 
house a whole collection of weapons was 
found [the Mayor had ordered the women to 
bring to his house every weapon that they 
could find, that the Germans might have no 
excuse for saying that any one had struck 
their soldiers or fired a gun]. All the in- 
habitants, without exception, were brought 
out and shot. This shooting was heart-break- 
ing, as they all knelt down and prayed, but 
praying is no ground for mercy. A few 
shots rang out, and they fell back into the 
green grass and slept forever. It is real 
sport." But how did Eitel Anders sleep 
that night? We know that Macbeth did 
not sleep after he murdered Duncan and 
Banquo. Did the Kaiser succeed in stultify- 
ing conscience in Eitel Anders ? The next 
day the soldier made another entry ; — mark 
the opening words : " This morning, in happy 
mood and high spirits, we passed through 
Taturages. But before this we cleaned up 
the suburb of Mons, and burned the houses. 
The inhabitants came out of the houses into the 
open plain. Here many heart-breaking scenes 
occurred. It was really terrible to watch." 

35 



German Atrocities 

Plainly the soldier's token and the Kaiser's 
scheme succeeded. Having stated that he 
had murdered men, young Eitel Anders 
sleeps well at night, and the " next morning 
in happy mood and high spirits " wakened 
to plan fresh crimes. Macbeth had no Ger- 
man soldier's token to help him sleep at 
night. Conscience became the whisper of 
God in his soul. Sleep forsook his eyes, 
and slumber his eyelids. Shakespeare's mur- 
derer did not dare trust himself out under 
the stars that blazed with anger, but Eitel 
Anders' sleep was not disturbed by the blood 
upon his hands, because he really believed 
the Kaiser would be able to stand between 
him and the Great Day of Judgment. 

After General Clauss shot fifteen aged men 
in the streets of Gerbeviller, too, that officer 
rode away with a light heart, quite free 
from the remorse that unseated the reason 
of Macbeth. Plainly the Kaiser's scheme 
succeeded. It destroyed conscience in many 
German officers and soldiers alike. To-day, 
the men of Germany without moral sense or 
any remorse following their crimes are like 
a sky that holds an empty socket where 
once the summer-making sun had shined. 
They are like human bodies out of which 

36 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

the intellect has passed, leaving only gib- 
bering idiots. The German " Laws of War 
on Land," their Handbook of Military Tac- 
tics, has organized crime into a science, and 
killed in men the spiritual optic nerve. Ger- 
many to-day is an intellectual machine, and 
her officers and her soldiers at last can com- 
mit crimes without remorse, which proves 
that they are becoming moral idiots. 

Geebevillee the Maetyeed 1 
In August of 1914, when the German 
army was broken and compelled to retreat 
before the French, they passed through 
many French towns and villages in which 
they found no soldiers and no weapons, and 
where no battle, no skirmish and no shot 
took place. During last July and August 
we went slowly from one of these ruined 
towns to another, talking with the broken- 
hearted women and children, comparing the 

lu In this village, from which the Germans had just 
retreated, I saw a proclamation by the German officer, 
saying that every Frenchman who refused to work should 
receive twenty blows of the whip ; the women, fifteen 
blows, and the boys and girls under fifteen years of age, 
ten blows." — Extract from letter of the American violinist, 
Albert Spalding, now a lieutenant serving in France. 

37 



German Atrocities 

photographs taken immediately after the 
German retreat and almost before the muti- 
lated bodies were cold. Slowly we sifted 
the evidence. On the ground we compared 
the full official records made at the time, 
with the statements of wretched survivors 
who live in cellars, where once stood the 
beautiful homes, the orchards and vineyards, 
but where now all is desolation and anguish. 
Among the multitude of events described 
by witnesses who survived the martyrdom 
of their village are the following: When 
the noise of the approach of General Clauss' 
division of twenty thousand soldiers in full 
retreat was heard, an aged Frenchman stood 
in his open door. He had retired from 
business, to spend his last days midst the 
friends of his childhood and youth. Hear- 
ing the noise of the approaching army, the 
merchant stepped to his open door. As the 
first automobile swept by, the German offi- 
cers lifted their revolvers and emptied the 
lead into the old man's body. He pitched 
forward down the stone steps, and in his 
death struggle worked his way to the wrought 
iron gate, where after the German retreat he 
was found dead. Before touching the body, 
official photographers, under the direction of 

38 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

their noble Prefect, took their photographs 
from different angles. In the garden behind 
the smoking cellar was found the wife, lying 
dead upon the grass, her left wrist tied by 
the clothes-line to the root of an apple tree, 
the right wrist tied to a clump of gooseberry 
bushes. She was dead, but not through dag- 
ger or pistol. Standing beside their graves 
we studied the photographs and talked with 
the families of the fifteen aged men whom 
General Clauss ordered shot because there 
were no young or middle-aged men in the 
village whom he could kill. 

BUENING OF AN AMBULANCE DEIVER 
Most harrowing the testimony given by 
the mother of a Red Cross ambulance 
driver. The day before the Germans came, 
this man had returned from the front, bring- 
ing an ambulance filled with wounded sol- 
diers. While the division of twenty thou- 
sand Germans were looting the houses, and 
carrying away every rug, carpet, table, chair, 
picture, tool, art treasure towards the Rhine, 
German officers entered the house of Sister 
Juliet, who was nursing the wounded sol- 
diers. Finding the young Red Cross man 
there, they immediately shot him. Later 

39 



German Atrocities 

while his mother was holding his head in 
her arms and staunching his wounds, a Ger- 
man officer approached and, seizing her 
hands, held them behind her back, while 
one of the privates poured petrol over her 
son's head. With two fingers this soldier 
ripped the clothes from the breast of the 
wounded man and poured oil under his shirt 
and then set fire to his garments. Referring 
to his death struggles and the photograph 
of the charred mass that had once been her 
son lying on the brick pavement, this mother 
exclaimed, " If I had only let him bleed to 
death ! If I had only let him bleed to death ! 
Then they could not have made him die 
twice ! " 

The Muedee of Heeeminel 
In a little farming village not many miles 
from Gerbeviller the martyred, stands a 
battered square belfry, into which the Ger- 
mans lifted their machine guns, hoping to 
hold back the pursuit of the French army, 
thus giving General Clauss time to retreat 
and " dig in " some miles to the northeast. 
Tying the ropes to the axle of automobile 
trucks, the Germans soon lifted their guns 
into the church tower. They then drove the 

40 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

French women and children into the church 
and used them as a screen, for no German 
ever exposes himself to danger if he can 
possibly find a woman or child behind whom 
he can hide. One young mother did not 
immediately obey, because of certain duties 
in connection with her little child. "With 
two other girls this young wife was stood up 
against the stone wall of her own little house 
and shot, for the purpose of teaching French 
women to obey instantly when German sav- 
ages command. 

When all the women and children were 
packed into the church, a boy was sent back 
to tell the French that if they fired upon the 
guns in the church belfry, they would kill 
their own families. Two nights later when 
a storm was raging, the women slipped a 
little boy through the window, and sent 
word to the officers of the approaching 
French army that their wives wished them 
to open fire on the German guns. In blow- 
ing these weapons out of the belfry, the 
French killed twenty of their own wives 
and children, who preferred to share death 
with the men they loved, rather than suffer 
nameless indignities from German brutes. 
In a hundred years of history where shall 

41 



German Atrocities 

you find a record of soldiers, whether red, 
black or yellow, save Germans, who were 
such sneaking, snivelling cowards that they 
do not dare play the game fairly and like 
men, but in their chattering terror use 
women and little children as shields against 
danger ? Of a truth, the " Potsdam gang " 
has added a new word to the literature of 
cowardice. 

The Frenchman's Love of France 
Terrible also the German assassination of 
the land itself. All men love their native 
land, but the Frenchman's love has a unique 
quality. He speaks of La Belle France as 
Dante spoke of Beatrice, as Petrarch spoke 
of Laura, and the name of France lingers 
upon his lips as music trembles in the air 
after the song is sung. 

It is love of native land that has made 
France beautiful just as through affection 
the lark, after completing its nest, makes it 
soft and warm by pulling the down out of 
her own bosom. The French people love 
France as Millais loved his Gleaners, as 
Bellini loved the missal he had illuminated, 
and as that young architect loved the little 
Koslyn chapel, upon whose delicate capitals 

42 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

he had lavished his very soul. For centuries 
the enemies of farms, houses, towns and cities 
have been fire, flood and earthquake. Wit- 
ness the city of St. Pierre. An interior ex- 
plosion blew off the cap of the mountain and 
a flood of gas poured down upon the lovely 
city, asphyxiated the citizens and left not 
one house standing. Witness that mighty 
convulsion in San Francisco that brought 
thousands of brick buildings crashing down 
in ruins. Witness the fire in Chicago that 
turned the great city into piles of twisted 
iron and ashes. In New Zealand there is 
a lake called Avernus, the birdless lake. 
Poisonous gases rise from the black flood of 
water, and soon the lark with its song, and 
the eagle with its flight fall into the poison- 
ous flood. 

But all these images are quite inadequate 
to explain the devastation of France upon 
the retreat of the Germans. About forty 
miles north of Paris, one strikes the ruined 
region. Then hour after hour passes, while 
with slow movement and breaking heart the 
investigator journeys one hundred miles to 
the north and zigzags one hundred and 
twenty-five miles south again, through that 
ruined region. Centuries ago Julius Caesar 

43 



German Atrocities 

described it as a wild land, rough, with 
forests filled with wolves. Then the 
Frenchman entered the scene. He subdued 
all the wild grasses, drained the valleys and 
widened the streams into canals. He en- 
riched the fields, surrounded the meadows 
with odorous hedges and filled swamps with 
perfumed shrubs. Slowly the Frenchman 
threw arches of stone across the streams and 
carved the bridges until they were rich in 
art, while everything made for use was 
carried up to beauty. He gave to the roof 
of the barn its lovely lines ; the approach to 
the house was upon a curved road, the high- 
ways were shaded by two rows of noble trees. 
The stony hillside was terraced, and there 
the vines grew purple in the sun. How 
simple was his life ! What a sanctuary his 
little home ! With what rich embroidery of 
wheat he covered all the hills ! He was 
prudent without being stingy, thrifty with- 
out being mean. The French peasant saves 
against old age with one hand and distributes 
to his children with the other. 

What Hate Can Do 
And having lavished all their love upon 
the little farmhouse, the granary and the 

44 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

garden, having pruned these grape-vines with 
their clusters of white and purple, the time 
came when each vine seemed like a friend, 
dear as that miraculous picture was to 
Baucis and Philemon. For these reasons 
all France was invested with affection and 
beauty. 

The French peasants loved their land and 
then lost it. One morning the Hun stood at 
the gate. The farmers with their pruning 
knives were no match for Germans with 
their machine guns, and down they fell under 
the plum trees they were pruning. The 
devastated regions of France are like unto a 
world ruined by devils. The Germans cut 
down the apples, the pears, and all the 
peaches. They did not spare the cherry, the 
quince, the gooseberry and currant, or the 
vineyards. Gone also all the beautiful 
bridges — they have been dynamited ! Gone 
all the lovely and majestic Thirteenth Cen- 
tury churches ! Gone all the galleries, for 
some of the finest art treasures in the world 
have perished. 

The land has been put back to where it 
was when Julius Caesar described it two 
thousand years ago — a wild land, and waste, 
growing up with thorns and thistles. That 

45 



German Atrocities 

proclamation on a wall tells the whole story. 
" Let no building stand, no vine or tree. 
Before retreating see that the wells and 
springs are plentifully polluted with corpses 
and with creasote." The spirit was this, 
" Since we Germans cannot have this land, 
no one else shall." 

Peince Eitel's Ceime 

But there is more. One of the historic 
chateaux is that of Avricourt, rich in noble 
associations of history. It was one of the 
class of buildings covered by a clause in the 
international agreements between Germany, 
France and the United States and all the 
civilized nations, safeguarding historic build- 
ings. For many months it was the home of 
Prince Eitel, the Kaiser's second son. 

When a judge and jury held inquiry at 
the ruins of the chateau, the aged French 
servant, who understood the electric lighting 
and had charge of the gas plant during 
Eitel's occupancy, stated that he heard the 
German officers telling Eitel Frederick that 
he would disgrace the German name if he 
destroyed a building that had no relation to 
war, that could be of no aid or comfort to 
the French army, and that he would make 

4 6 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

his own name, and that of his familv, a name 
of shame and contempt, of obloquy and 
scorn. But the man would not yield He 
brought in his auto trucks and carried to the 
freight cars every historic object in the 
splendid chateau. Having pledged himself 
to leave the building uninjured, the prince 
stopped his car at the gates of the exit, ran 
back to this historic house, filled his fire- 
brand, spread the flames upon the halls 
waited until the flames were well in progress' 
and then ordered his men to light the fuse of 
dynamite bombs. A few days later inquiry 
was held and testimony of aged servants 
and little children was taken. The degen 
eracy of this German Prince as then revealed 
has not been equalled since the first chapter 
of Romans catalogued the unnatural crimes 
of the men of the ancient world. Germany 
has no artistic sense. Her own poet, Heine 
predicts that she will yet pull in pieces her 
one fine cathedral. The German poet does 
not thmk any beautiful thing is safe so lone 
as it is m German hands. This gifted Hebrew 
had the vision that literally saw the German 
pounding to pieces the Cathedral at Louvain 
and Ypres, in Arras, in Bapaume, in St 
^uentin, and Bheims. 

47 



German Atrocities 

Eheims Cathedral 

One of the atrocities that has horrified the 
civilized world has been the ruin of Rheims 
Cathedral. Germany, of course, was denied 
by nature any gift of imagination. The 
German mind is a hearty, mediocre mind, 
that can multiply and exploit the inventions 
and discoveries of the other races. The 
Germans contributed practically nothing to 
the invention of the locomotive, the steam- 
boat, the Marconigram, the automobile, the 
airplane, the phonograph, the sewing ma- 
chine, the reaper, the electric light. Even as 
to the weapons with which she fights, Ameri- 
cans invented for Germany her revolver, her 
machine gun, her turreted ship, and her sub- 
marine. In retrospect it seems absolutely 
incredible that Germany could have been so 
helplessly and hopelessly unequal to the in- 
vention of the tools that have made her rich. 

But imagination is not her gift. If Shef- 
field can give her a model knife, Germany 
can reproduce that knife in quantities and 
undersell Sheffield. The German people keep 
step in a regiment, in a factory and on a 
ship, and therefore are wholesalers. The 
French mind is creative. It stands for indi- 
vidual excellence, and is at the other extreme 

4 8 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

from the German temperament. The emblem 
of the German intellect is beer ; the emblem 
of the English intellect is port wine ; the 
emblem of the French mind is champagne ; 
the emblem of an American intellect like 
Emerson's is a beaker filled with sunshine — 
but Germany has a " beer " mind. It is this 
lack of imagination that explains Nietzsche's 
statement that for two hundred years Ger- 
many has been " the enemy of culture " while 
Heinrich Heine insists that " the very name 
of culture is France." 

It is this total lack of any appreciation of 
art and architecture that explains Germany's 
destruction of some of the noblest buildings 
of the world. She cannot by any chance 
conceive how the other races look upon her 
vandalism. Her own foreign secretary ex- 
pressed it publicly in one of her state papers, 
"Let the neutrals cease chattering about 
cathedrals. Germany does not care one straw 
if all the galleries and churches in the world 
were destroyed, providing we gain our mili- 
tary ends." Guizot in his history of civiliza- 
tion presents three tests of a civilized peo- 
ple: First, they revere their pledges and 
honour; second, they reverence and pursue 
the beautiful in painting, architecture and 

49 



German Atrocities 

literature ; third, they exhibit sympathy in 
reform towards the poor, the weak and the 
unfortunate. 

Now apply those tests to the Kaiser and 
his War Staff, and you understand why 
Kheims Cathedral is a ruin. 1 No building 
since the Parthenon was more precious to 
the world's culture. What majesty and dig- 
nity in the lines ! What a wealth of statu- 
ary ! How wonderful the Twelfth Century 
glass ! With what lightness did these arches 
leap into the air! Now, the great bombs 
have torn holes through the roof ; only little 
bits of glass remain ; broken are the arches, 
ruined these flying buttresses, the altar where 
Jeanne d' Arc stood at the crowning of Charles 
is quite gone. The great library, the bish- 
op's palace, all the art treasures are in ruins. 
But ancient and noble buildings do not be- 
long to a race, they belong to the world. 
Sacred forever the threshold of the Parthe- 
non, once pressed by the feet of Socrates 

1 During last September and October, at the author's 
suggestion, the American etcher — Louis Orr — for eighteen 
days was in Rheims Cathedral while under bombard- 
ment. Mr. Orr is one of the most distinguished etchers 
now living. He has sent to Dr. Hillis 2, 400 copies of 
his three etchings to be sold for the Red Cross work 
under official direction. 

50 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

and Plato ! Thrice sacred that aisle of Santa 
Croce in Florence, dear to Dante and Savona- 
rola. To be treasured forever the solemn 
beauty of Westminster Abbey, holding the 
dust of men of supreme genius. 

In front of the wreck of the Cathedral 
of Eheims, all blackened with German fire, 
broken with the German hammer, is the 
statue of Jeanne d'Arc. There she stands, 
immortal forever, guiding the steed of the 
sun with the left hand, lifting the banners 
of peace and liberty with the right. By 
some strange chance, no bomb injured that 
bronze. That figure seems a beautiful proph- 
ecy of a day when the spirit of liberty, riding 
in a chariot of the sun, shall guide a greater 
host made up of all the peoples who revere 
the treasures of art and architecture, and 
law and liberty, and will ride on to a victory 
that will be the sublimest conquest in the 
annals of time. 

The Devastation of the Fkench 
Home 

But the ruin of his cathedrals, his gal- 
leries, his schoolhouses, his libraries, his 
farmhouses, his vineyards and orchards, is 
the least of sorrows of the Frenchman. In 

5i 



German Atrocities 

a little village near Ham dwelt a man who 
had saved a fortune for his old age, 100,000 
francs. When the invading army, like a 
black wave, was approaching, he buried his 
treasure beneath the large, flat stones that 
made the walk from the road up to the 
front step of his house. Then, with the 
other villagers, the old man fled. Many- 
months passed by, while the Germans bom- 
barded the village. At last the German 
wave retreated, and once more the old man 
drew near to his little village. There was 
nothing, nothing left. After a long time, 
he located the street, which was on the very 
edge of the town, but could not find the 
cellar of his own house. Great shells had 
fallen. Exploding in the cellar, they had 
blown the bricks away. Then other shells 
had fallen hard by and blown dirt that filled 
up what once had been a cellar. The very 
trees in front of his house had been blown 
away and replaced by shell pits. In one of 
his reports Ambassador Sharp states that 
the aged man had up to that time failed to 
locate his house, much less his buried treas- 
ure. But what trifles light as air are 
houses in contrast with other forms of 
desolation ! 

52 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

Ruined Homes and Hopes 
At the officers' headquarters, one night 
after returning from the front, several offi- 
cers were recounting to us their dramatic 
experiences. Many harrowing tales were 
told. During the winter of 1915, in the 
trenches at the foot of Yimy Ridge, several 
English officers and a French captain were 
down in a safety cellar having their pipes 
together and recounting the events of the 
day. Rain was falling and they delayed 
their stay. Finally the moment came to 
return to their trenches above. At that 
moment an English sentinel exclaimed: 
" One week from to-day and I will be home 
in England with my wife and baby. One 
more week ! The next seven days seem to 
me like seven eternities." The English cap- 
tain congratulated the boy, saying, " In two 
months my permission will come and I will 
have eight days home with my family." 
Then the English officer noticed the French 
officer's agitation. Turning to him, the 
English captain exclaimed, " And when do 
you go, Captain ? " " When do I go home," 
exclaimed the Frenchman bitterly, " when 
do I go home? You Englishmen do not 
understand ! Your land has never been in- 

53 



German Atrocities 

vaded. Go home! To what could I go? 
The Germans have been in my land for a 
year. My little town is gone, quite gone. 
My little house is gone, and gone my little 
shop ! My wife is still a young woman ! 
My little girl, — she is just a little, little girl ! 
Why, I never thought of her as a woman ! 
And now our priest writes me that my 
young wife and my little girl will have 
babes in two months by these brutes ! " And 
then the storm broke. The Frenchman beat 
his head upon the rude table, while the two 
Englishmen fled into the rain and night, 
knowing that the rain was nothing against 
those tears of pain, for that man's hopes 
were dead forever. That lieutenant's only 
task was to recover France and then transfer 
all his ambitions to God in Heaven. 

Such devastations of the soul are why 
there must be no inconclusive peace. Un- 
conditional surrender is the only word. 
Whether this war goes on one year or five 
years it must go on until the Hun repents 
and makes restitution — so far as possible. 
Alas, a myriad of these German outrages 
are irremediable! Thoughtful men doubt 
whether the German will ever learn the 
wickedness of his own atrocities and the 

54 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

crimes of militarism until his own land is 
laid waste, until he sees the horrors of war 
with his own eyes, and hears the groans of 
his own people with his own ears, sees his 
own land laid desolate, finds his own heart 
crushed under anguish. Yet retribution in 
kind would be unthinkable for the Allies ! 

The Foul Crime Against Women 
Many Americans have looked with horror 
upon the photograph of the mutilated bodies 
of women. Sacred forever the bosom of his 
mother, and not less sacred the body of every 
woman. Not content with mutilating the 
bodies of Allied officers, of Belgian boys, 
they lifted the knife upon the loveliness of 
woman. The explanation was first given by 
the Germans themselves. When the Hun 
joins the army, he must pass his medical ex- 
amination. A few drops of blood are taken 
from the left arm, and the Wassermann 
blood culture is developed. If free from 
disease, the soldier receives a card giving 
him access to the camp women, who are kept 
in the rear for the convenience of the Ger- 
man soldier. If, however, the Wassermann 
test shows that the German has syphilis, the 
soldier bids him report to the commanding 

55 



German Atrocities 

officer. The captain tells him plainly that 
he must stay away from the camp women 
upon peril of his life, and that if he uses one 
of their girls he will be shot like a dog. Hav- 
ing syphilis himself, the German will hand 
it on to the camp girl, and she in turn will 
contaminate all the other soldiers, and that 
means that the Kaiser would soon have no 
army. Therefore, the soldier that has this 
foul disease must stay away from the camp 
women on peril of his life. Under this re- 
striction the syphilitic soldier has but one 
chance, namely, to capture a Belgian or 
French girl ; but using this girl means con- 
taminating her, and she in turn will con- 
taminate the next German using her. To 
save his own life, therefore, when the syphi- 
litic German has used a French or Belgian 
girl, he cuts off her breast as a warning to 
the next German soldier. The girl's life 
weighs less than nothing against lust or the 
possibility of losing his life by being charged 
with the contamination of his brother Ger- 
man. 

Insane Through Pain and Grief 
One pathetic and dramatic story ran up 
and down the trenches upon a line twenty 
. 56 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

miles in length. Told by different soldiers, 
that tragic story never varies in the essen- 
tial facts. When the Germans ruined a 
village near Ham, they carried away some 
fifty-four girls and women between the ages 
of fourteen and forty. These girls were 
held behind the lines among the camp 
women, kept for the Huns. One chilly 
morning last April a French boy, lying on a 
board on the bottom of his trench, heard 
the wild shrieks of a girl. Standing on tip- 
toe he peeped over the top to find the French 
soldiers in the one trench and the Boches in 
the other had forgotten the peril of the 
sniper's bullet, and were staring at a young 
girl out in No Man's Land. One week of 
cruelty had driven the girl insane. The 
German soldiers had lifted her out of their 
trench, and with their bayonets had pushed 
her in the direction of the French lines, and 
were shouting to her to go over to her 
friends among the French. 

What the French soldiers saw was a 
young woman, clothed in a dark blue skirt, 
her waist torn, her bosom exposed, her hair 
loose upon her shoulders. She was standing 
bewildered in No Man's Land. Now she 
poured forth the pealing laughter of a 

57 



German Atrocities 

maniac, and now she seemed to be talking 
to herself. Suddenly her eye caught sight 
of a human body, wearing the garb of a 
French soldier. The girl did not know that 
it was a French boy who in the darkness 
had been cutting the barbed wire, and in the 
midst of the German flare had been caught by 
a bullet. Mistaking the dead boy for that 
of her young husband, the girl ran forward, 
fell upon her knees, and lifted the body that 
was already cold into her arms. From time 
to time she would take an arm grown stiff 
and try to put it around her neck and then 
gaze upon it, not understanding why the 
cold hands did not clasp her around in the 
dear accustomed way. Suddenly her eyes 
saw his coat, lying near by ; but she did not 
know that the boy in his death struggles 
had torn that coat from his body. She 
thought that garment, already stiff with 
blood, was her own little babe. Picking up 
the coat, she dropped upon her knees, lifted 
it to her breast, and began to sway to and 
fro, and soon the French soldiers heard a 
lullaby, familiar and dear to every French- 
man whose mother with that song charmed 
the fear out of the eyes and the terror from 
the heart. So terrible was the scene that 

58 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

for the moment the Frenchman and German 
alike forgot all warfare ! Finally, a German 
lifted his rifle to the shoulder, and as the girl, 
rising to her feet, flung the bloody coat 
away, and screamed, " The Boche ! the 
Boche ! " his rifle cracked, and the young 
woman sank slowly down. A moment 
later, all helmets, German and French alike, 
disappeared behind the trenches. Silence 
rested on No Man's Land, and events went 
on as before. But for France the world will 
never be the same again. German crimes 
have lighted a flame of sacred anger that 
will never burn out until German cruelty 
has been utterly consumed. That is why 
the fire sparkles in the eyes of the Allied 
soldiers whenever you suggest peace by 
negotiation, or a peace without victory. 

A Wounded Gebman Colonel 

Last winter, a German colonel was shot 
through the spinal cord. His lower limbs 
were completely paralyzed, and the par- 
alysis began to extend to his hands. The 
wounded man developed the theory that if 
he could only be carried back to Germany 
recovery was possible. Lifted into an am- 
bulance, he was carried twelve miles to the 

59 



German Atrocities 

northeast, towards the Rhine. Unable to 
endure the agony of the rough road, he 
commanded the ambulance driver to stop 

in front of the priest's house, near . 

Two aged French women cared for the 
wounded man during January, February and 
March. Little by little the wings of the 
angel of death fanned away the mist before 
the eyes of the German officer. For two 
and a half years he had carried an aluminum 
token with a portrait of the German Kaiser's 
conception of God, and the words, " Strike 
them all dead. The Day of Judgment will 
not ask you for reasons." But at last a mo- 
ment had come when he lost confidence in 
the pledge of the Kaiser and the War Staff 
to stand between him and an outraged God. 
One morning a little French boy waited 
after mass to tell the priest that the German 
officer wanted him to come at once. The 
important message proved to be a warning 
that the von Hindenburg line was nearly 
completed, that the orders for retreat had 
gone out, that every church, bank, factory, 
house, was to be looted and then burned, and 
the whole region turned into a desolation. 
" These two aged women and you yourself 
have been very kind to me, and this pass 

60 



Their Nature and Philosophy 

will take you through the German lines to 
a place of safety." And then the dying 
officer advised the priest to take the two 
women and go away at once. The news 
utterly crushed the kindly man of God. 
Touched by the grief of the white-haired 
priest, and perhaps terrified by memory and 
remorse, words of righteous wrath and re- 
pentance fell from the lips of the officer. 
These were his last words, as that old priest 
transcribed them from the lips of this dying 
German. " Curses upon our army ! Curses 
upon our Kaiser, and our War Staff ! Ten 
thousand curses upon the Fatherland ! 
Either God is dead or Germany is doomed ! " 
Going out of the door, the last words the 
aged priest heard were the dying curses of 
an officer, whose soul had been debauched 
by his Kaiser and his War Staff, and who 
upon the brink of the Day of Judgment 
realized that for every crime he must give an 
account unto God. "Woe unto him who 
offends one of my little ones ; it were better 
for him that a millstone were hanged about 
his neck and that he were drowned in the 
depths of the sea." 

That conscience-smitten dying German 
packed the genius of the moral universe into 

61 



German Atrocities 

the curse he pronounced upon the Kaiser, the 
"War Staff and the Fatherland. When the 
veil was taken away from his eyes he saw 
that the stars in their courses were fighting 
against the Kaiser. In the awful hour of 
death he learned at last that God is not 
dead, but that because of her atrocities, Ger- 
many is doomed. 



62 



II 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme, 

For Which Germany Lost 

Her Soul 



" Our motto is ' from Hamburg to the Persian 
gulf.' " — Professor Tannemann. 

" In this Pan-German Empire, Germans alone 
will govern ; they alone will exercise political 
rights ; they alone will serve in the army and 
navy ; they alone will have the right to hold 
land ; and they will thus be made to feel that 
they are a people of rulers, as they were in the 
Middle Ages. They will, however, allow in- 
ferior tasks to be carried out by the foreign sub- 
jects under their domination. " — " Gross Deutsch- 
land und Mitteleuropa um das Jahr 7950" p. 48. 

" Why should we make paltry excuses ? 

Yes, we brought on this war, and we are glad of 

it. We provoked it, because we were sure of 

winning." 

Maximilian Hardin, 

In Zuku?ift, Aug. 20, 19 14. 

" After this war is over, I will stand no non- 
sense from the United States." — The Kaiser's 
threat to Ambassador Gerard, 



II 

The Pan-German Empire Scheme, 

For Which Germany Lost 

Her Soul 

GEKMAN apostasy began with German 
military success. What the Kaiser 
offered to Germany in exchange for her soul 
was the Pan-German empire. The origi- 
nator of the world empire scheme was the 
Kaiser ; Nietzsche was its philosopher ; 
Treitsche its historian ; Bernhardi its advo- 
cate ; and von Hindenburg its executive. 
The first conference regarding the Pan-Ger- 
man empire seems to have been called in 
1895, and was held in the Potsdam Palace. 
During the next two or three years, a world 
organization was brought together by the 
" Potsdam gang," with the Kaiser at the 
center, an inner circle of officers, and poli- 
ticians, a larger circle of bankers, manufac- 
turers, and ship owners. Finally there was 
a far-flung web of diplomats, spies, commer- 

65 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

cial travellers, Pan-German League agents, 
organizing in New York, Chicago and San 
Francisco, in Buenos Ayres and Bio Janeiro, 
in Buda Pesth and Vienna, in Constanti- 
nople and Cairo, German Yeteran Leagues, 
German Commercial Associations, all look- 
ing towards the day when the Kaiser would 
be the world emperor, and all countries 
would become provinces paying tribute to 
the world capital, Berlin. "What about 
international law ? " asked an American dip- 
lomat of Bernhardi. " There will be no in- 
ternational law," was the answer. " Berlin 
will decide what laws are best for the rest 
of the world." 

The Pan-German empire pamphlets, maps, 
books, magazine articles, published during 
the next ten years, were legion, but Pro- 
fessor Tannemann, a personal friend of the 
Kaiser, in 1911 restated the Kaiser's scheme. 
The essence of Pan-German plan was con- 
densed into a few sentences : " From Ham- 
burg and the North Sea to the Persian 
Gulf ; the immediate goal, by 1915, the con- 
quest of 250,000,000 of people ; the ultimate 
goal, the Germanization of all the nations of 
the world." One of the Kaiser's speeches 
contains the explanation of his dream of be- 

66 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

coming a world conqueror : " From my child- 
hood I have been under the influence of five 
men, — Alexander, Julius Caesar, Theodoric 
II, Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Each 
of these men dreamed a dream of a world 
empire ; they failed. I am dreaming a 
dream of a German world empire — and my 
mailed fist shall succeed." The Kaiser 
printed a map headed, " The Eoman Em- 
pire ; Caesar Augustus, world emperor." 
That map shows the once great states, 
Athens, Ephesus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, 
Carthage, reduced to county seat towns, 
paying tribute to the world capital, while 
their captive kings had walked as slaves in 
the triumphal processions along the Appian 
Way, towards the palace of the world ruler, 
Caesar Augustus. One of the Pan-German 
empire pamphlets, and many of the German 
newspapers contain a revised map of Europe, 
showing " Germania " stamped across the 
continent, with St. Petersburg, Paris and 
London become county seat towns, paying 
tribute to the world capital, Berlin. Many 
German newspapers, during this war, have 
published maps showing Canada as a Ger- 
man province, with the name " Germania " 
stamped across South America, Mexico and 

67 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

Central America. These many pamphlets 
and Pan-German empire books explain Ad- 
miral Dewey's report to President McKin- 
ley. That report seems to have been written 
in the cabin of the flag-ship Olympia, in 
Manila Bay. Dewey states that the Ger- 
man admiral told him plainly to make a 
note of this prophecy that within fifteen 
years (1899, report of Admiral Dewey), Ger- 
many would crush France and Belgium, seize 
Holland and Denmark, utterly destroy Eng- 
land, and take Canada as a German province. 
Admiral Dewey added that the German ad- 
miral told him that while the Kaiser intended 
to seize ISTew York and Washington and hold 
them for an indemnity, he did not intend to 
permanently hold in subjection the United 
States, but he did intend to retain Mexico 
and South America, and then " dispose of 
the Monroe Doctrine as he thinks best." 
This may explain the Kaiser's word to Mr. 
Gerard : " After this war I will stand no non- 
sense from the United States." So astound- 
ing were these claims that the statesmen 
and rulers of the world laughed at these 
threats, deeming it incredible that Germany 
was plotting a world war. Two or three 
men of remarkable prescience and vision, 

68 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

General Koberts in London, Cheradame in 
Paris, and Ex-President Koosevelt, under- 
stood and therefore never ceased warning 
the nation to prepare and make ready for a 
conflict that seemed to them inevitable. 

When the Kaiser first announced his Pan- 
German empire scheme he bribed his people 
by appeals to avarice, ambition, and jeal- 
ousy of England and Kussia. The argu- 
ments used by the Potsdam gang were very 
simple : Agriculture pays six per cent., trade 
eight per cent., finance ten per cent., ship- 
ping twelve per cent., but war is an in- 
dustry that pays fifty per cent, dividend 
upon the investment. Germany's war upon 
little Denmark, a people without army or 
navy, paid an enormous dividend upon the 
investment, in that it gave Germany one of 
her richest provinces, made possible the Kiel 
Canal, and left Denmark permanently crip- 
pled and exposed. " Denmark and Holland, 
also, are apples," says a German author, 
" that are slowly ripening, and we will pick 
the fruit at the proper time." Germany's 
war of 1864 upon Austria was the attack of 
a brigand upon a traveller rich with gold, and 
the cities and provinces that Germany wrested 
away from the ruler of Vienna paid a hun- 

69 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

dred per cent, upon the investment. In his 
Memoirs Bismarck tells the world plainly that 
he deliberately fomented a war with France, 
that he might seize the iron ore provinces of 
Alsace and Lorraine, in order to obtain the 
hematite iron that would make it possible 
for Germany to pass from the agricultural 
people into an industrial and manufacturing 
state as the competitor of England for the 
world's trade. For more than forty years 
the chief argument presented in the Reichs- 
tag for increased appropriations for the army 
and the navy was the money dividends paid 
by war. 

In 1911 the Kaiser spread out before his 
people bribes most alluring. Just as the 
Devil led Jesus up into a mountain and 
showed Him the whole earth, so the Kaiser 
and the Potsdam gang led the Germans into 
a mount of temptation and showed them 
how easy it was to make the Kaiser a world 
emperor. The argument was very simple ; 
after twenty-five years of preparation, Ger- 
many has nine million soldiers, has cannons, 
liquid fire, poisoned gases, battle-ships, aero- 
planes, with every wagon and automobile 
ready to have the pleasure body removed, 
and a military body substituted. " We are 

70 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

ready to the last buckle on the horses' har- 
ness." To the east was Russia, broken by 
war with Japan ; Russia with her gold mines, 
her wheat granaries, her vast coal and iron 
deposits and forests all undeveloped. To 
the southeast was Rumania, with her oil 
wells, with Constantinople and the silk fields, 
and the Tigris, the gateway to the Indian 
Ocean, and the treasures of the Bagdad rail- 
way country. To the west was unarmed 
Belgium, rich with twenty billions of treas- 
ure ; France, half armed, with her newly dis- 
covered iron mines and coal measures ; Eng- 
land, one vast jewel box, a kind of Aladdin's 
cave, — " Wait until Germany lifts her mailed 
fists upon the English treasure box, there 
will be enough for everybody in Berlin," is 
the gist of Zimmermann's speech of Novem- 
ber, 1914. " The people of the United States 
call us Huns," writes the editor of the Local- 
anzeiger, but New York had better remember 
that the young Huns from the German forests 
took only two weeks to cross the Alps and 
loot the city of Rome." Other German 
members of the Reichstag have likened the 
United States unto a Croesus, the richest 
man in the world, living in a golden house, 
surrounded with bags, bursting with gems 

7i 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

and wedges of gold and silver, but a Croesus 
that had no lock on his door and no weapon 
in his hand. 

The Treasure Boxes of Europe 
" Belgium is a lamb, France and England 
are flocks of sheep, feeding and fattening in 
the pasture, ready for our shears." All 
these statements were sent out through Ger- 
many. The other nations are so many treas- 
ure boxes, ready for our military key to un- 
lock them. Boys, farmers' sons, discussed the 
coming looting expedition in the ^hayfields. 
College boys talked about the treasures of 
England and France, Belgium and Holland, 
as boys once talked about emptying the newly 
discovered gold mines of California. Officers 
drank to " The Day." Editors added fuel to 
the flames of avarice. The statesmen cried, 
" It is our duty to rule these countries, and 
besides, by war we get great gain." 

The influence of these incitements to ava- 
rice and ambition is found in the letters taken 
from the dead bodies of German soldiers. 
In one letter, found near Yitrimont, the 
German lover tells his sweetheart that he 
expects soon to be in Paris, and will bring 
her a handful of diamond rings, and a pocket 

72 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

full of bracelets and a few Paris gowns. 
Another German boy writes his young wife 
about a little valley in France with rich 
pastures and meadows, and beautiful farm- 
houses, and how Heinrich, Hans and Died- 
rich had decided to pick out the four best 
farms on which they would live as soon as 
they had cleaned up Paris. He adds, how- 
ever, that Hans thinks it would be much 
better for them to wait until England is 
smashed, and when Canada is a colony, they 
can pick farms there two or three miles 
square, and make their children great land- 
owners. For this war was to pay Germany 
a thousand per cent, dividend on her invest- 
ment. 

And who, even already, can deny that in 
large part Germany has made good the 
bribes offered to German boys ? When one 
thinks how Germany has looted the states 
of Europe of her gold and silver, her bonds 
and stocks, their pictures, books, furniture, 
laces, silks, wheat, corn, wine, it is easy to 
understand the Kaiser's statement that "war 
should be Germany's chief national industry." 
With the Kaiser crime has prospered. 

Germany wanted this war, planned this 
war, prepared for this war, and made treas- 

73 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

ure houses in which she could store the loot 
of this war. Blood went to Germany's head 
like drugged wine. For years she has been 
beside herself with military success. The 
Kaiser for twenty years has been rattling 
his sword and bullying the nations. Stand- 
ing in the market-place, like some huge 
Goliath, in the spirit of the common braggart 
he has shouted, u I can lick anybody in the 
world." In the nature of the case, one 
brigand with his revolver is equal to a hun- 
dred business men and manufacturers in a 
railroad car. In the nature of the case also, 
Germany, with her military preparedness, 
should have been equal to a score of coun- 
tries like Belgium and France and Great 
Britain and the United States — industrious, 
hard-working, but unmilitary, peacefully 
disposed. The deadly virus of avarice and 
militarism has burned like a fever in Ger- 
many's soul, even as avarice burned in the 
soul of Judas Iscariot, and made him a 
traitor that crucified not Belgium, but Jesus 
upon the cross. 

The German People and the Kaiser 
Little by little under the influence of 
this Pan-German empire scheme, the Ger- 

74 



For Which Gernany Lost Her Soul 

man people began to go to pieces morally. 
The breakdown of character is slow. The 
most virulent disease needs time to destroy 
the tissues, and poison the blood. The 
first to go over to the Potsdam gang 
were the officers and the army. Next fol- 
lowed the university professors, the bank- 
ers and the landowners. Last of all came 
the manufacturers and the shippers, who for 
a long time were timid lest their foreign 
trade be injured. Finally the state clergy, 
who received their salary from the Kaiser's 
treasury, were whipped into line, and men 
like Eucken, Harnack, heard the crack of 
the slave-driver's scourge above their heads, 
and became abject servants. 

At last the woven web was spread all 
over the world through spies. Could any 
man have been lifted up above Berlin, and 
had full power to survey the whole world, 
he would have seen a spider's web, with its 
center in Berlin, with the Kaiser as the big 
black spider, sending out along the sinuous 
threads into every capital of every country 
and of every continent his evil plans and 
plots. Men like von Bernstorff in Washing- 
ton, and Miinsterberg in Boston, von Bopp, 
recently convicted in San Francisco, Luxburg 

75 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

in Buenos Ayres, with their schemes to blow 
up munition factories, planting of bombshells 
in ships, dynamiting Parliament buildings, 
blowing up bridges, organizing sedition in 
Mexico, India, and Brazil, the millions and 
millions of dollars spent in our own country, 
the secret decorations of medals given to 
bankers, manufacturers, shippers, editors, 
newspaper boys, stenographers, make up a 
story of Machiavellian deviltry and subtle 
cunning that has no parallel. The only dif- 
ference between Judas and the average Ger- 
man spy is that the modern spy in the 
United States would not only have betrayed 
Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but would 
have given ten per cent, off for cash. All 
that Germany won in three hundred years 
through the teachings of Martin Luther has 
been lost in twenty-five years through the 
influence of the Kaiser and his militarists. 
In the presence of all the world we have 
seen Germany lose her soul. All that John 
Milton taught, as to the fall of Satan as an 
angel, becoming a devil, has been literally 
enacted on the stage before the nations of 
the earth. What in 1900 was efficiency, in 
1914 became the science of lying, theft, rape, 
poison and assassination. 

76 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

Geemany Constructs a Philos- 
ophy to Justify Heeself 

Having entered upon war as her chief 
national industry, and looking with greedy 
eyes upon the steel plants, the looms and 
factories of rich Belgium ; envying France 
her unique supremacy as the leader of the 
fine arts ; tempted by the little states like 
Holland and Denmark on the west and 
Kumania and Poland on the east, states that 
seemed like purple clusters, bursting with 
wine for German lips, it became necessary 
for Germany to find a philosophy that would 
break down the great convictions of morality 
inherited from Martin Luther. 

All wise men trace deeds back to the 
thinking of the doer, just as they trace bit- 
ter water back to a poisoned spring. Of 
the German teaching of Prussianism we can 
only say, no grapes from Prussian thorns, 
no figs from Prussian thistles. What the 
Prussians thought in their hearts, that they 
became in their lives. What began as sparks 
of avarice and ambition has ended in this 
world conflagration, and Germany is re- 
sponsible, not for the sparks, but for the 
world ruin. Alcibiades and Catiline and 
Benedict Arnold all thought in terms of 

77 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

selfishness, and they all did cruel deeds. 
The murder of Edith Cavell and Captain 
Fryatt, the sinking of women and children 
on steamers, the rape of Belgium and North- 
ern France, the assassination of Poland, the 
deliberate, cold-blooded plots by the German 
officers with the Turkish soldiers to exter- 
minate the Armenians, so that they could 
settle on the lands, are the outer exhibition 
in deeds of the inner philosophy of the Ger- 
mans. That is why their favorite philos- 
opher Nietzsche says that Germany's gift is 
brute force and not intellect. ( " Ecce Homo," 
page 38, and page 134 : " Wherever Germany 
extends her sway, she ruins culture. I feel it 
my duty to tell the Germans that every crime 
against culture lies on their conscience.") 

A philosophy therefore was concocted, 
called " Prussianism." This philosophy is 
no secret, for Germany has trumpeted it 
forth, from the top of the palace in Potsdam 
and the Dom in Berlin. For fifteen years 
it has been the very essence of the teaching 
in her universities, her pulpit, her press and 
her Parliament. This is its substance : Over 
against Martin Luther's conception of God 
as the All-wise and Good Father, who is 
righteous Himself, and demands righteous- 

78 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

ness of His children, the new philosophy sets 
up the political State as the be-all and end-all 
for the German people. Omnipotence means 
a Kaiser's arm, with that of a war staff, 
carried up to the nth degree of power by 
seventy millions of other arms. 

"Weakness is the only sin against the 
Holy Ghost," cries Bernhardi. Let the in- 
dividual German soldier be strong enough 
to trample under foot the Belgian or French 
merchant or girl. Let the German navy be 
strong enough to sink every Lusitania or 
Sussex. Let the German army be equal to 
overrunning, looting, pillaging and dyna- 
miting France and Belgium. To be beaten 
is to be contemptible, and therefore to be 
sinful. Whatever wins the victory on land or 
sea is right. The moment Germany crosses 
the frontiers all Belgians and Frenchmen lose 
any right whatever to either their lives or 
their property, but from that moment the 
invader's life and effects become sacred. 

The Eeflex Influence of the Pan- 
German Scheme Upon Germany's 
Statesmen 

Most disastrous and disorganizing the re- 
flex influence of Germany's philosophy of 

79 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

Prussianism, and her plot for a Pan-German 
empire upon Germany's statesmen and dip- 
lomats. From Phocion to Lincoln high- 
minded statesmen have been jealous of their 
pledges and of their treaties with other 
countries. In one of his noblest orations 
Edmund Burke speaks of " the peculiar sanc- 
tity attaching to an international treaty." 
Our own Washington spoke about the impor- 
tance of consideration and long deliberation 
before an ambassador gave his word that, 
once it is given, must stand " like the law of 
God." Business men scoff at the trickster, 
who plays fast and loose with his written 
word given to the bank or to his creditors. 
Nor is there a tribe of Indians that, once 
they have eaten salt, or exchanged the pipe 
of peace, but considers the pledge precious 
as life itself. All civilized nations, therefore, 
have been horrified at the way Germany has 
broken down on the side of truthfulness, 
until it is a proverb in the world to-day that 
a thing is as worthless as a written pledge 
by Germany. 

The Sceap of Paper 

Our scholars have long known that Fred- 
erick the Great was the first German to say 

80 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

that international treaties were to be observed 
so long as they were useful and served his 
purpose, and when that time passed a treaty 
was to be counted " a scrap of paper." "When 
then the English Ambassador, on July 1, 1914, 
told Bethmann-Hollweg plainly that if Ger- 
many invaded Belgium England would have 
no other course than to join her armies to 
those of Belgium and France, the German 
Prime Minister exclaimed, " And declare war 
for what ? For just a scrap of paper ! " We 
now know that Germany signed treaties for 
purposes of diplomatic camouflage, to blind 
the eyes of other governments while she was 
making ready her weapons for attack. Most 
significant that speech in the Keichstag on 
July 31, 1914, that contains this : " We can- 
not longer postpone the fulfillment of the 
pledge given to Austria at the conference of 
July 5th." During all those days, between 
July 30th and August 4th, when the Kaiser 
was apparently trying to prevent war, Ger- 
many and Austria were secretly preparing 
cannon, guns, ammunition, railway trains, 
food, and secretly hurrying them to the 
front, during three entire weeks, following 
the agreement between the Kaiser and the 
Emperor. Upon eternal brass, therefore, 

8i 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

Germany engraved her own infamy. "We 
are now in a state of necessity, and necessity 
knows no law. We were compelled to over- 
ride the just protest of the Belgian govern- 
ment. The wrong— I speak openly — that we 
are committing, we will endeavour to make 
good as soon as our military goal has been 
reached. Anybody who is threatened as we 
are threatened can have only one thought, 
how he is to hack his way through, — how he 
is to hack his way through." 

Consul to Norway 
That is why our President, speaking for 
the republic, has told Germany plainly that 
no treaty signed by the Emperor and his 
government means anything whatsoever. 
There is no German in the Fatherland or in 
the United States but understands thoroughly 
that the word of a German statesman is less 
than nothing : the shadow of the shade of the 
possibility of a cipher. Here is von Bern- 
storff, given his papers and sent back to Ber- 
lin. Bernstorff gives out a final interview, 
stating that he has the full approval of his 
conscience (a favourite expression of German 
spies), in that he was carrying away from the 
United States the full consciousness that he 

82 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

had never done one deed or had one thought 
save to draw the Fatherland and the great 
republic closer together, though all the time 
his secret agents had been journeying back 
and forth between Washington and Mexico, 
carrying bribes, organizing sedition, matur- 
ing plots, looking towards war between Mex- 
ico and Texas, and pledging Carranza that 
Germany would restore to her New Mexico, 
Arizona and Nevada. Scarcely less horrible 
Luxburg's cipher despatch advising Ger- 
many to sink the steamers of the Argentine 
Kepublic, "leaving no trace behind." In 
Norway the German Ambassador from Ber- 
lin used his trunk, covered with the red seal- 
ing wax of the Foreign Office, to carry 
bombs, and the cultures of glanders and 
anthrax to spread disease among the Nor- 
wegian people and to sink their steamers. 
In the old days of Ca3sar Borgia in Italy, 
poisoning was made a fine art. Whenever 
the Italian prince coveted a rich man's pal- 
ace, diamond ring, beautiful wife or young 
daughter, or his villa, he invited the owner 
to dine at the palace, having first of all poi- 
soned the wine or the meat. Now the world 
has wakened up to discover that the Borgias 
were children in the arts of dissimulation 

83 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

and hypocrisy, and that Germany is the origi- 
nal inventor of perjury. The Kaiser, Beth- 
mann-Hollweg, von Bernstorff, and some pro- 
Germans in this country have displayed a 
form of wickedness so cool, calculated, and 
scientific, as to seem the characteristics of 
fiends, while their plots to plant bombshells 
on our steamers, and kill innocent people by 
the hundreds represent such hardened forms 
of fiendishness that even the worst thief 
would scarcely dare hint at such crimes to 
his own accomplice in devilishness. 

Germany's Policy Towaeds the 
United States 

Not less striking the influence of Germany's 
philosophy and her Pan-German empire 
scheme upon her diplomats in foreign coun- 
tries. "We need not take the opinion of the 
British or Belgian, the French or American 
authors. It is enough to ask for the testi- 
mony of the Germans themselves. One of 
the most important documents bearing upon 
this war is a volume of reminiscences pub- 
lished seven years before the war began, but 
practically unknown in the United States. 
This volume is entitled " Experiences at a 
German Embassy; ten years of German- 

8 4 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

American diplomacy," by Emil Witte, late 
counsellor of litigation ; Leipzig, 1907. Proba- 
bly not more than two or three thousand of 
the author's friends ever bought a copy of 
this book, but the volume spreads out before 
us like a black map the fact that for ten years 
von Holleben and Munsterberg with their 
German associates were steadily building up 
the organization of all German Americans 
preparatory to a time when the war between 
the United States and Germany would par- 
take the character of a Civil War. 

This counsellor of litigation tells us that 
on the German day, October 6, 1901, Ger- 
manism in the United States was organized 
at Philadelphia. The diplomat then tells us 
how, directed by the German Ambassador, 
he went up and down the United States 
organizing in ISTew York, Brooklyn, Chicago, 
Milwaukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis the 
German Soldiers' Societies of the United 
States, and wooing the German-Americans 
over to the point where they would see that 
their first allegiance was to the Fatherland, 
their second to the United States. The 
German foreign office and the Kaiser were 
constantly sending von Holleben for German- 
Americans flags, decorations, gracious letters, 

85 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

medals, invitations to visit Germany and 
meet the Koyalty — methods that culminated 
in the German law that made it possible for 
pro-Germans in this country and for their 
sons despite American citizenship to keep 
their German citizenship with all the rights 
of suffrage in the Fatherland. Very sig- 
nificant also one sentence in these remi- 
niscences of this German diplomat : " The 
relations between Official Germany and the 
emigrant subjects of the Emperor, whether 
they have become citizens of the Kepublic or 
not, may lead to serious complications between 
Germany and the United States, and to un- 
foreseen incidents which at any moment may 
involve both powers in serious difficulty." 

JSTo scholar longer doubts that the German 
government fully expected that when war 
was declared some six or eight thousand 
German-Americans belonging to the Ger- 
man Societies in the United States would 
bring about something akin to Civil War. 
This is not to be wondered at in view of the 
fact that for years Germany's official repre- 
sentatives had been receiving from time to 
time honours and addresses from the Kaiser 
and sending back to Berlin cablegrams 
pledging undying faithfulness and loyalty, 

86 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

and affirming their purpose to enthrone 
German culture in the United States. This 
diplomat quotes in full the address of the 
German Ambassador in behalf of the 
Kaiser on presenting the German colours 
to the German Military Society of Chicago. 
" Greetings from the German Emperor ! 
That is the a cry with which I come before 
you. His Majesty, my most gracious master, 
has ordered me to hand to you to-day the 
colour which has been desired by you so 
strongly and for so long. The colour is a 
token of his Majesty's approval with which 
the Kaiser remembers in love and friendship 
those who have served in the German Army 
and Navy, and those who have fought and 
bled for the Fatherland. This colour is to 
be the symbol of German faithfulness, Ger- 
man manliness and German military honour. 
His Majesty asks you to accept this colour 
as a token of that unity which should prevail 
among all German soldiers, to act also abroad 
[Think of that "abroad," in Chicago!] in 
accordance with the sentiments of German 
loyalty and German sense of duty, and to 
take for your maxim the word of that 
great German, Bismarck : We Germans fear 
God, but nothing else in the world. JSTow 

87 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

let the colour flutter in the wind. In this 
moment of enthusiasm let us all sound the 
cry that is now on the lips of every old Ger- 
man soldier ; his Majesty, the German Em- 
peror, William II, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah ! " 
The history of no country contains plot so 
astounding ! Under cover of hospitality the 
German guest was planting bombshells in 
the home of his host. With infinite cun- 
ning, the German diplomats built a German 
kingdom within our kingdom. How thor- 
oughly they alienated many German- Amer- 
icans is proven to-day by this fact, that many 
members of the German Societies in the 
United States, the moment any American 
comes out against Germany, break with the 
banker, drop the newspaper, give up the 
pew in the church, for while their lips an- 
nounce that they are Americans, in their 
heart they feel that their first loyalty is to 
the Kaiser, and not to our government. 

Geeman Diplomats in the Westeen 
Cities 

These " Reminiscences " also acquaint 
Americans with many other plans to 
organize the German-Americans in the 
United States preparatory to the day when 

88 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

Canada and the United States should become 
German colonies. Silly as all this seems 
to Americans it was very serious to von 
Holleben, von Bopp, the recently convicted 
German consul, Miinsterberg, Boy-Ed, von 
Papen and Bernstorff. In discussing the 
certainty of war with England, the author 
states that Germany is absolutely ready for 
such an event as war in America, since this 
is necessary. He quotes von Schleinitz as 
answering: "I know all this and I know 
more. I have spoken with officers in high 
positions in Berlin, and I have heard sur- 
prising things. Germany reckons very 
strongly upon the support of Germans liv- 
ing in the western states. We looked at one 
another. We Knew." 

Little did the people of the United States 
realize that in 1907, buried in the German 
language, there was being sold in Germany a 
volume of reminiscences by a counsellor of 
legation at the German Embassy in Washing- 
ton, containing these sentences : " Professor 
Miinsterberg had created a widely spread 
organization of espionage in the United 
States. Miinsterberg had been sent to 
America by direct command of the Em- 
peror, in order to mislead the public of the 

8 9 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

United States with regard to Germany's true 
policy towards America. He receives five 
thousand dollars from Harvard and five 
thousand dollars from the Berlin foreign 
office." Then follows high praise for Miin- 
sterberg in view of the fact that he was sent 
to the United States as a lecturer, as a 
camouflage device to conceal the real fact 
that he was the new head of the German 
spy system in America. Beyond all doubt 
he was almost the only one that succeeded 
in making his camouflage work of lecturing 
so successful as to overshadow the more im- 
portant fact that he was the organizer of 
the most efficient system of espionage that 
the Kaiser has ever had. 1 

German Philosophy of Militarism 
Has Debauched Germany's Univer- 
sity Professors 

Consider how strangely the Pan-German 

lu On Thursday afternoon in connection with the 
sentence pronounced upon von Bopp and the German vice 
consul and the German attorney for complicity in the 
plot to blow up factories the dispatches said much about 
'the man higher up.' One of the references plainly re- 
ferred to Miinsterberg. On Saturday morning Miinster- 
berg fell dead of apoplexy. Many Secret Service men 
associate the two events." — Extract from address by Law- 
rence Chamberlain. 

90 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

scheme has degraded Germany's university 
professors. The glory of every great city 
and land is its scholars, with their love of 
truth, and their stainless lives. We have 
had our civilization at the hands of men who 
loved the truth supremely, pursued the truth 
eternally, and cherished the truth above 
their fear of hell or hope of heaven. The 
world has its liberty, its science and its law 
at the hands of the heroes who preferred the 
truth above life. Concerning the patriots, 
the reformers and the statesmen, we can 
only say they were stoned, they were sawn 
asunder, they were crucified in Jerusalem, 
poisoned in Athens, tortured in Ephesus, 
exiled in Florence, burned at the stake in 
Oxford, assassinated in London. But the 
iron autocracy and militarism of Germany 
made cowards of her university men. An 
address has been issued to the civilized 
world, signed by ninety-odd German pro- 
fessors. They receive their salaries from 
State endowments. Any hour the Kaiser or 
the Chancellor can cut off their income. 
When the indignation of the civilized world 
flamed out against Germany because of the 
rape of Belgium, the German Government 
asked these professors to sign a document, 

9i 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

and so degraded were these men through the 
German philosophy of militarism and autoc- 
racy, that they obeyed — losing their souls 
to save their salary. And consider what 
they signed ! 

MOKAL COWAKDICE OF SCHOLAKS 

By royal command these ninety-three pro- 
fessors signed a statement saying: "It is 
not true that we wronged Belgium." In the 
Kaiser's address that he himself published, 
we read, "Give no quarter, take no pris- 
oners"; he adds, "Let all who fall into 
your hands be at your mercy ; make your- 
self as terrible as the Huns." This address 
was circulated on millions of letter cards 
all over Germany. Eealizing the mistake 
made by the Kaiser these professors signed 
a statement saying : " It is not true that our 
soldiers ever injured the life of a single 
Belgian." Socrates, Savonarola or Lincoln 
would have died a thousand deaths upon 
the rack, rather than have consented to 
sign their names to a lie, but the Kaiser 
and the Chancellor had only to command 
their servants to lie, and they lied like 
slaves. It makes the university professor 
ashamed of the German teachers. Think of 

92 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

Harnack and Eucken, with their moral 
cowardice and their intellectual subserviency. 
Plainly that is what Nietzsche meant when 
he said (page 134, "Ecce Homo"), "Every 
crime against culture that has been com- 
mitted for a hundred years rests upon Ger- 
many." 

Germany Organizes a Plan to Ex- 
terminate Conscience 

"When her Kaiser and Germany's War 
Staff had determined to do evil, to become 
world conquerors, and prepared a philos- 
ophy that would justify the crimes neces- 
sary to win the goal, Germany then began 
to get rid of any vestige of conscience that 
survived from the faith of Martin Luther. 
It was not enough to control the philoso- 
phers and scholars, it became necessary to 
popularize the new license to lawlessness, 
lust and theft. Unfortunately, Germany was 
complicated by her treaties with other na- 
tions as to the conduct of war. These 
treaties were a thousand times more sacred 
than contracts of the merchant for a note 
at his bank. Germany had solemnly cove- 
nanted to attack only armies, and to safeguard 
and protect hospitals, schools, churches, with 

93 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

the life and property of non-combatants. 
The Christian religion, also, as presented by 
the German Luther, taught obligations in- 
volved in the Ten Commandments. The 
new system of militarism, therefore, could 
enter the mind of the German soldier only 
when the old ideas of the Ten Command- 
ments, duty, God, and the obligations to 
the weak, as taught by Jesus, had been cast 
out. One of the crimes proscribed by civi- 
lized states is the crime of teaching other 
men to do wickedness. But the German 
Kaiser and War Staff have so far lost their 
souls that they have deliberately written a 
text-book teaching men murder as a science. 

Finally Germany Enthroned Cruelty 
Instead of Christ's Law of Pity 

Having substituted the Prussian theory of 
the State for Christianity, having replaced 
the eternal God with the word Force, spelt 
with a capital " F," having gotten the Devil 
all mixed up with God, until the Kaiser 
planned Devil deeds and signed God's name 
to them, finally Germany decided to slay 
humanitarianism, pity, sympathy, and re- 
gard for the poor and weak. Nineteen cen- 
turies ago Jesus taught men that God by 

94 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

His dear Son had identified Himself with 
the poor and the weak. Taking a little 
child, Jesus said, "Take heed that ye offend 
not one of my little ones." Christianity is 
kindness, and pity. Out of Christ's teach- 
ings came the world's hospitals, the emanci- 
pation of slaves, homes for the aged and the 
invalid, schools for orphans, hospitals for the 
sick. Jesus' sympathy has journeyed like an 
angel of God across the fields of the world, 
and God's sweet mercy has fallen like rain 
from His heaven to cool men's fevered souls. 
Just in proportion as men have gone towards 
God, they have gone towards pity and com- 
passion. Florence Nightingale and Augusta 
Stanley enter the smitten hospitals of the 
Crimea ; Mother Bickerdyke and all her as- 
sociates are found on the battle-fields of 
our Civil War ; John Howard organizes the 
Prison Kelief movement. Everywhere so- 
ciety climbs upward upon the golden rounds 
of sympathy, and philanthropy. 

But Germany despises kindness. She now 
bombs hospitals, sinks passenger ships, and 
the malignancy of her cruelties has horrified 
savages in the South Sea Islands. Over 
against the teachings of Jesus therefore put 
the German frightfulness. Kead the article 

95 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

by that American physician, who left Ger- 
many last summer by way of Switzerland. 
Note that when a train of English soldiers 
passed through the town, a train loaded 
with prisoners packed in freight cars, with- 
out sanitation, wounded men who had been 
without food or drink for three days, men 
who, with black lips, begged the German 
women for water, that these women held 
water just out of reach of these English 
soldiers, and then spilling it on the ground, 
spat in the faces of these wounded men! 
When Germans were marching into a 
Belgian village, a German captain ordered 
the villagerg to go into the church. The 
houses were then searched. Unfortunately 
no weapons were found, and therefore there 
was no excuse for looting the town and 
then burning the buildings. The diary of 
a German soldier says that his captain 
showed him a window opening into the cel- 
lar of a Belgian house, and told him to put a 
gun in through the window. A few minutes 
later the captain " discovered " the gun, and 
taking the weapon into the church told all 
the villagers that concealed weapons had 
been found, and they must all be shot and 
the village destroyed. The German bur- 

96 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

glar's life was sacred, but the honest house- 
holder's life and that of his family were as 
nothing, losing all rights because the Ger- 
man burglar has broken open the door. 

This new philosophy of militarism teaches 
that crimes become virtues if they promote 
the interests of the Fatherland. To accept 
the hospitality, to plot arson, bombing and 
sedition ; to play false to all the higher con- 
siderations of honour, through the treachery 
of Bernstorff, von Papen, Boy-Ed, is beau- 
tiful and glorious for a German. The black- 
est deeds become sacred because they pro- 
mote German interests. So thoroughly has 
this philosophy of loyalty to the Fatherland 
permeated the German soul in every part of 
the world, that — despite multitudes of large- 
hearted, open-minded American citizens who 
came hither from German homes to better 
their political and industrial conditions, and 
who, Germans as they are, gratefully appre- 
ciate and are loyal to the America that has 
welcomed them — there are also thousands of 
German-Americans about us from whose 
lips you cannot obtain one word of criti- 
cism of the blackest deeds of murder and 
arson and treachery by Germany's agents in 
this country, or of Germany abroad. What- 

97 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

ever is done for the Fatherland is right, no 
matter what crime is involved. 

It is precisely to this type that Jesus ad- 
dressed His words about the light in men 
that had become darkness, and therefore 
" how great is that darkness." By this route 
Germans have gone downward towards spir- 
itual apostasy. 

Gekmany's "Wolfish Spieit 
Germany's inspiration seems to be that of 
the treacherous wolf. Intellectually we can- 
not understand how a shepherd can watch 
wolves tearing the throat of the lamb in the 
Belgian sheepfold and the French sheepfold, 
while he stands by and waits until the wolf 
tears some lambs and sheep in the American 
sheepfold. When a brave man has seen a 
wolf tear the throat of one lamb he ought to 
leap from his place of safety and take his 
place beside the lamb. Of course, the wolf 
has many explanations to offer, but the ex- 
planations of the wolf do not interest some 
men. There are some foul diseases, like 
slavery, that have to be cut out by the 
surgery of war. Militarism and autocracy 
are cancers, and God has anointed the 
surgeon with ointment, black and sulphur- 

98 



For Which Germany Lost Her Soul 

ous. But the surgeon's knife has to be 
heated red hot, that it may cauterize the 
wounds, lest the patient bleed and die. 

" We must choose," said Bernhardi, " be- 
tween Napoleon and Jesus." 

The people of the United States have 
chosen between Militarism and Jesus. Our 
fathers chose eighteen centuries ago. They 
left the law of the pack behind. They chose 
to become the sons of God, and lose their 
lives that Christ's little ones might survive. 
Hospitals, reforms, schoolhouses for children, 
reform acts, emancipation proclamations, the 
Declaration of Independence, justice, and 
man's redemption are the results. German 
militarism is the apotheosis of the law of the 
wolf -pack, return to the club and the cave- 
man. If she succeeds in a return to brute 
force, her victory will be the most terrible 
calamity that overwhelmed the earth since 
that event that Milton describes in his story 
of the rebellion in heaven. Every editor and 
school-teacher, every priest and minister, 
every patriot and parent, should drill into 
the minds of children and youth the Kaiser's 
original charge and the meaning thereof: 
" No quarter will be given, no prisoners will 
be taken. Let all who fall into your hands 

99 



The Pan-German Empire Scheme 

be at your mercy. Make yourselves more 
frightful than the Huns under Attila." 
Strange, therefore, the Germans feel so ter- 
ribly because men call them Huns ! Who 
understood their real nature ? The Kaiser. 
Who branded them on the forehead with 
a red-hot iron, " Huns " ? Their Kaiser. 
Whose bloody fingers were lifted upon their 
heads when his mildewed lips christened 
them "Hun"? Their Kaiser. Who likened 
the German soldiers to bloodhounds held 
upon the leash as they strained forward to 
tear women and children in Belgium and 
France? Their Kaiser. But Jesus said, 
Woe unto him that offends against one of 
My little ones ! And out of the whirlwind 
comes the voice of an outraged God, saying 
to the invaders, " Here stay thy bloody 
waves ! Thus far, and no farther ! " 



ioo 



Ill 



What the United States and Her 
Allies Are Fighting For 



Statement Made by Admiral V071 Goetzen 
at Manila in i8^8 y to Admiral Dewey 

" About fifteen years from now my country 
will start a great war. She will be in Paris in 
about two months after the commencement of 
hostilities. Her move on Paris will be but a step 
to her real object — the crushing of England. 

" Some months after we finish our work in 
Europe we will take New York, and probably 
Washington, and hold them for some time. We 
will put your country in its place with reference 
to Germany. We do not propose to take any of 
your territory, but we do intend to take a billion 
or so of your dollars from New York and other 
places. 

" The Monroe Doctrine will be taken charge 
of by us and we will dispose of South America 
as we wish. Don't forget this about fifteen years 
from now." 



Ill 

What the United States and Her 
Allies Are Fighting For 

NOT since Fort Sumter was fired upon 
and Bull Kun lost have thoughtful 
men been so disturbed as to-day. The 
breakdown of Russia, the massing of Ger- 
man troops on the western front, the accu- 
mulation of cannon and munitions against 
the day of account, make it certain that the 
coming inevitable battle is to be the greatest 
battle of the most terrible war that ever 
shook our earth. All the issues vital to de- 
mocracy, independence, freedom, and self- 
government are now at stake. It is a 
singular fact that the four liberties won by 
our fathers during four wars are now to be 
nobly won again, or meanly lost in a single 
struggle with Germany. In 1776 our fathers 
won freedom upon the land ; in 1812 they 
fought for the freedom of the seas ; in 1846, 
in their war with Mexico, they established 
the sanctity of frontier lines ; in 1861 our 
fathers safeguarded liberty for white men by 

103 



What the United States 

extending liberty to black men. In 1898 
the young men of this republic lifted a shield 
above the little land of Cuba, in the hour 
when it was being butchered, just as little 
Belgium to-day is being butchered by Ger- 
many. Now, strangely enough, every form 
of liberty won by these wars is denied to the 
human race by the militarism and autocracy 
of Germany. 

Once more these forms of democracy must 
be reasserted, revindicated and reestablished. 
We expect militarism in folk like the old 
Macedonians and Romans, and occasional 
outbreaks among Indians and the savages of 
the South Sea Islands, but we do not expect 
that a nation industrially efficient and claim- 
ing to be civilized should suddenly revert to 
savagery, and revive the methods of the cave 
man. Society protects itself against the oc- 
casional burglar with his nitroglycerine, dark 
lantern, and revolver, by building a jail for 
the lawbreaker. Civilized states find that 
it is impossible to build jails for nine mil- 
lion Germans who have become thieves, mur- 
derers, violators of women and children. On 
German terms life is not worth living for 
the boys and girls of Belgium, France and 
Poland. If Germany wins, an eclipse will 

104 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

pass over the face of the sun. The industrial 
nations will have to adopt militarism. The 
United States will become one vast armed 
camp. Every boy will give three or four 
years to the life of the soldier. The Atlan- 
tic Coast and the Pacific must bristle with 
forts, and the harbours be filled with mines. 
The ploughman in the furrow and the work- 
man in the factory will have to carry a sol- 
dier upon their shoulders. The whole world 
must become one vast volcano, with Berlin 
as the crater, spouting forth passion and hate 
like lurid lava. Not since Judas brought 
Jesus to the piteous tragedy of His cross has 
there been an hour so black as this moment 
when Germany is trying to crucify mankind 
upon a cross of bayonets. 

Autocracy and Democracy Incompati- 
ble and Mutually Destructive 

During the past forty years there have 
been in Germany on the one hand, and in the 
Allied states on the other, two incompatible 
and mutually destructive principles, — one 
named Military Autocracy and the other De- 
mocracy. The conflict between the two was 
irrepressible, and our entrance into the war 
inevitable. Lincoln once said that a house 

105 



What the United States 

divided against itself could not stand ; that 
the republic could not endure half slave and 
half free ; that it must become all one thing 
or all the other. To-day Europe, and indeed 
the world, represent a house divided against 
itself. It cannot remain half autocratic and 
half democratic; it must become all one 
thing or all the other. Either Germany 
must conquer England, France and the 
United States, and impose autocracy upon 
them, and enthrone the Kaiser as the world 
emperor, or else the Allies must conquer 
Germany, and overthrow autocracy and mili- 
tarism, until Germany, and Austria, Bulgaria 
and Turkey become truly self -governed. On 
that August day in 1914, therefore, it became 
morally obligatory upon every patriot, every 
city and every nation to make the choice be- 
tween autocracy and democracy. In the 
hour when the battle lines were set in array, 
between autocracy and democracy, on August 
4, 1914, neutrality became intellectually ab- 
surd and morally monstrous. Serving both 
God and Mammon became unthinkable. 
Even after our President declared that we 
must make the world safe for democracy, a 
few men tried to be neutral, and stretched 
out the right hand to Germany and the left 

106 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

hand to the United States, in the spirit of the 
man who declined to choose between hell and 
heaven, saying he had friends in both 
places. The time has fully come to recognize 
that civilization and autocracy are deadly 
antagonists. John Milton defined a book as 
the precious life-blood of a master spirit, 
treasured up and handed on to the future. 
" As good almost kill a man as kill a good 
book." But the free and democratic institu- 
tions are the precious life-blood of the pa- 
triots, the heroes and martyrs, preserved, 
and handed forward, as means for winning 
the Golden Age. Better, therefore, a thou- 
sand times, that the Kaiser should murder 
mankind than assassinate the free institutions 
that manufacture manhood of good quality, 
and make human life worth the living. 

The Steength of Oue Enemy 
The battle line between a military autoc- 
racy and the free government is now set in 
array. It is to the last degree important 
that our people know the strength of the ad- 
versary. Prudent men never underestimate 
their opponents. Brave men want to know 
the worst that can be said, truthfully. Let 
us confess that Germany with her nine 

107 



What the United States 

million soldiers, ammunition accumulated 
through twenty-five years of preparation, has 
suffered no vital hurt. Three years of battle 
have lessened the wealth of the Allied na- 
tions, but vastly increased the treasures of 
Germany. This war has cost Great Britain 
thirty billions of dollars, it has cost France 
twenty billions, it has cost the United States 
ten billions. For these billions expended 
there has been for the Allies no financial re- 
turn. In striking contrast thereto, consider 
that if Germany has spent twenty billions 
upon this war, she has won another twenty 
billions, and even claims to have won thirty 
billions. Thus far, her armies, like those of 
ancient Kome, have looted four countries. 
She has carried away their gold, silver, cop- 
per, iron, steel, stocks, bonds, she has stolen 
their locomotives, passenger coaches, freight 
cars, wagons, automobiles, with all the goods 
of merchants. In the face of her solemn 
treaties she has stolen the horses, cattle, oxen, 
sheep ; she has spoiled the granaries of their 
wheat, rye and barley. She has looted the 
Belgian and French factories of their machin- 
ery, and carried away the looms from the 
mills for cotton, wool and silk. The total 
value of the steel mills of Belgium and of 

108 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

France, with all lathes and stationary en- 
gines, is almost incalculable. She looted the 
iron and coal mines of Belgium and France 
and the wells of Rumania for the oil ; she 
has looted the mines of Poland, Rumania and 
Serbia of their bronze, lead, zinc, copper. 
She has loaded thousands upon thousands of 
freight trains with household furniture, agri- 
cultural implements, goods from the mer- 
chants' stores, art treasures from public gal- 
leries, as well as from private houses. In 
every city and town, in every store and 
farmer's house, the Germans attack first of 
all the safety vaults and the little money 
chest of rich and poor alike. Germany found 
Belgium worth twenty billion of dollars. It 
is probable that she has spoiled Belgium of 
at least eight billions. The national fortunes 
of the invaded territories were estimated at 
fifty billions, and most of this, after three 
years, is now in the hands of the Germans. 
Each attack made by Germany has been 
against a rich people whose treasure she 
could loot, while every attack made by the 
Allies has been to recover a land already 
devastated, poor and helpless. In choosing 
Napoleon, therefore, rather than Jesus, Ger- 
many chose the motto of aggressive warfare, 

109 



What the United States 

and has made war an investment too profit- 
able to be readily abandoned. 

The peril to the Allies is the greater be- 
cause of the vicious methods used by Ger- 
many. All military experts know that wars 
are fought incidentally with guns at the 
trenches, but in reality with granaries at the 
rear. Better a million well-fed men with 
naked fists than two million of armed men 
who are starving, for the starving men will 
soon be too weak to lift the guns and the 
well-fed men will grasp the weapons. From 
the view-point of food resources, Germany 
has from the beginning occupied a unique 
position, in that she is rimmed all around 
about with little nations unprepared and un- 
armed, and therefore impotent to protect 
their granaries and root cellars, their herds 
and flocks, when Germans came in to steal 
them. Whenever Germany has, therefore, 
been short of food, she has organized an 
expedition and looted some land like Bel- 
gium, as Poland. The next winter she sends 
an army out to loot Rumania. Now that 
the harvests have been gathered in upon the 
fields of Italy, Germany is trying to despoil 
that land. 

Whenever she has had to withdraw a 
no 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

million men from the fields to send them to 
the front Germany has impressed another 
million from Belgium, Poland or Rumania, 
and forced these slaves to plough her fields, 
reap her harvests, and all without wage. 
Sometimes she has gone through the form 
of buying grain from the Balkan States, but 
she has forced these peoples to take in return 
paper currency, which she can grind out so 
long as the printing presses hold out and 
which in the event of defeat she can easily 
repudiate. On the other hand, when Turkey 
and Bulgaria have turned towards Germany 
for guns and munitions, since they had 
nowhere else to go, Berlin has forced their 
rulers to pay in gold and silver. Germany's 
claim is probably true, that her people are as 
well-fed during the fourth winter of the war 
as they were during the first winter. These 
are not pleasant matters to consider, but 
these are the facts. Wise men want to 
know the facts, and then they know what 
plans they must make to overcome the 
worst and turn it into the best. Better be 
a wise pessimist than an ignorant optimist. 
Uninformed Micawbers always waiting for 
something to turn up have no place in this 
world war. 

in 



What the United States 

The query, How goes the battle ? involves 
the statement that Germany is now fighting 
this war at the expense of her neighbours. 
Her great Krupp factories are using enor- 
mous quantities of coal, but it is Belgian 
coal. Every week she consumes vast stores 
of rich iron ore, but it is French ore. Her 
motors, trucks, military cars, consume oceans 
of oil ; this oil comes from Rumania. Each 
month she burns up human muscles in field 
and factory and shop, but these spent men 
and women are subject peoples. In a thou- 
sand ways events are worked for her in- 
terests. Because she is in the center it is 
very easy for Germany to transport her 
troops from one front to another, while it is 
very difficult for the United States to transport 
munitions and guns and food across an ocean 
3,000 miles in width. It is a conservative 
statement to say that it does not cost Ger- 
many one-tenth as much to move a cannon 
from Essen to Ypres as it costs the United 
States to move a machine gun from Bridge- 
port to Cambrai and Yerdun. 

Nor must we forget that we are building 
our iron ships with $6 a day labour, our 
wooden ships with $7 a day carpenters, 
while Germany is impressing labourers from 

112 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

Belgium and forcing them to work like 
slaves. Slowly she is starving them to 
death, while pretending to pay them seven 
cents a day for their eighteen hours of toil. 
When one group of men breaks down and 
dies, Germany simply forces at the point of 
the bayonet another group to take their 
places. Brutality, savagery, have an enor- 
mous advantage over civilized States. One 
wolf is equal to a hundred sheep and a thou- 
sand lambs. Thus far Germany has not lost 
one inch of territory, and this fact must be 
considered when we raise the question as to 
how goes the battle. 

Ignorant of the real situation, underesti- 
mating the peril that is upon the United 
States, many of our citizens refuse to support 
the government, discourage enlistment on 
the one hand, or else carry about with them 
an atmosphere of ignorant optimism. They 
talk loudly about America winning this war. 
They never tire of telling about our one 
hundred millions of people, our two hun- 
dred and fifty billions of wealth, our possible 
ten millions of soldiers, and upon the basis 
of these considerations they count the war 
ended, and win battles by waving perils into 
thin air. Others say that in a moral uni- 

ii3 



What the United States 

verse, injustice and cruelty cannot be victo- 
rious, and that in the nature of the case Ger- 
many must be beaten, quite forgetting that 
Belgium has been beaten, and so have Alsace 
and Lorraine. It is a truism that what has 
been may be. A just God permitted the 
first republic, Athens, to be ruined by her 
military neighbour, Macedonia. The story 
how the militarism of Macedonia brought 
about the fall of Athens, and contributed to 
dark ages, makes up a black page in the 
history of liberty. 

The ruthless hand of militarism snuffed 
out all the torches in the temples of intellect 
that once "looked down on Marathon, as 
Marathon looks on the sea." What scholar 
does not thrill with pain at the very thought 
of the brutal regiments that destroyed the 
temples, the libraries, the statues, the galler- 
ies of Athens ! Phocion believed, as did 
Plato and his pupils, that society had out- 
grown forever brute force, wars and sav- 
agery. Athens put her emphasis upon the 
intellect. She founded schools, and made 
her sons to be scholars. She became the 
mother of the arts, science and philosophy, 
and prided herself upon her artists and states- 
men. She established foreign colonies, 

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And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

builded ships and extended her trade to far- 
off lands in Sicily, Spain, Gaul and North 
Africa. Within a century Athens became 
the center of eloquence, poetry, philosophy 
and liberty. One day Prince Philip from 
Northern Macedonia visited Athens. He 
marvelled that the city should be like a vine- 
yard whose purple clusters were without a 
fence, whose treasure boxes were without 
watchmen. In that hour of avarice and 
ambition Philip remembered the soldiers in 
his father's army at home. He believed 
that one soldier could conquer a dozen mer- 
chants, bankers, statesmen and scholars. 

Keturning to Macedonia, Philip craftily 
began taking an interest in Greek affairs — for 
he was a subtle politician — and at the same 
time turned his whole people into one vast 
fighting machine. His unit was the Mace- 
donian Phalanx. First came twenty-four 
men, with short spears ; then came a second 
twenty-four, with spears of six feet ; then a 
third twenty-four, with spears of eight feet in 
length. The last tier of men in the company 
had spears twenty feet long, resting upon 
the shoulders of the men in the front rank. 
These bristling spears were invincible. The 
terror of the Macedonian Phalanx went out 

ii5 



What the United States 

into all the earth. Demosthenes was the one 
man who had vision. He called the people 
together upon the public square and assem- 
bled them in the great theatre. He mounted 
the rostrum upon Mars Hill and warned 
Athens. He called the attention of the peo- 
ple to the fact that between Athens on the 
south and Macedonia on the north were three 
buffer states. As the Macedonian army moved 
southward, these states organized their army 
and went forth in defence of their homes and 
their firesides. But Demosthenes insisted 
that these buffer states were fighting not 
only their own battles, but also the battles of 
Athens. If they fall, if their armies are de- 
feated, then Athens, single-handed, must 
meet the entire force of the victorious host. 
Nevertheless Athens delayed, and would not 
be persuaded. The noblest orations of the 
greatest man of his time, Demosthenes, were 
of no avail. 

When he crossed his southern frontier, 
Philip made himself terrible. The flames of 
the burning towns at midnight lighted up the 
land as a terrible warning. Thirty-two towns 
that had flourished as commercial communi- 
ties vanished from the face of the earth. 
These border states above Athens, answer- 

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And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

ing to our modern Belgium, were made into 
a desert. Terrorized into submission, the 
Greeks threw down their arms and opened 
the gates of their cities to Philip's soldiers, 
who brought with them women and children 
in fetters that the spirit of Athens might be 
utterly broken. 

Has there ever been in historic times any 
parallel quite so striking as that between the 
organized militarism of Macedonia with the 
subsequent ruin of Athens, and the present 
systematized militarism of Germany, now 
attempting the ruin of Belgium, France and 
England ? Listen to Professor von Stengel, 
the German authority on International Law : 
" There will be no conference at The Hague 
when this war is over. The one condition 
of prosperous existence for the natives is sub- 
mission to our [Germany's] supreme direction. 
Under our overlordship all international law 
would become superfluous, for we of our- 
selves, and instinctively, will give to each 
nation its own rights." 

What it Means to America 
The acuteness of our peril was well set 
forth in a conversation that took place last 
year between an aged German officer of the 

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What the United States 

Franco-Prussian war and a French officer 
who won his medal in the same campaign, 
both of whom had sought a rest in the vil- 
lage of Vevey upon the banks of Lake Ge- 
neva. For weeks the two old men on their 
wheeled chairs had passed each other with- 
out recognition. One morning, it is said, the 
German officer saluted. After expressing 
sorrow over the losses of the war, solely 
"for the purpose of making conversation," as 
he claimed, the German officer raised a ques- 
tion. First of all he insisted that he spoke 
merely as a private citizen who loved his 
fellow men, and represented in no sense the 
rulers in Berlin : " Suppose the German 
armies were to withdraw from Belgium and 
France, and agree to restore the devastated 
regions and repay England for her sunken 
ships. Do you think the Allies would then 
return to the conditions of 1914, granting 
the Fatherland the trade privileges that then 
were hers ? For," added the officer, " it is 
quite certain that Germany could never raise 
the billions of indemnity involved in the 
restoration of Belgium and France, and 
England's ships, unless she was free to buy 
raw material, kept her factories intact and 
also her three thousand and more passenger 

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And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

ships, freight ships, sailing vessels and her 
battle-ships to protect her fleet." 

To all of which, it is said, the Frenchman 
answered, in substance, as follows : " What 
you really mean is this, — that if France and 
England laid down their arms, and allowed 
Germany to keep her land uninvaded, her 
fleet intact, that so far from raising ten or 
twenty billions to restore Belgium and 
France and recompense England, the Kaiser 
would simply load one or two millions of 
his veterans on the three thousand of his 
ships, and sail away to New York, and 
assess the twenty or fifty billions on the 
American people. You must remember, " 
said the French officer, " that England and 
France do not betray their friends. They 
do not count their treaties ' scraps of paper.' 
My country will never consent to hand the 
United States over to the armies and the 
battle-ships of Germany." 

The genuineness of this brief discussion is 
beyond all doubt. The time has fully come 
therefore for every American and manufac- 
turer and merchant, every farmer and finan- 
cier, to realize that we have got to win this 
war, otherwise there will be no United 
States. We are unprepared for war or even 

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What the United States 

self-defense. After ten months of war Sec- 
retary Baker tells us frankly that thus far 
we have not one single machine gun com- 
pleted, that not until April will there be one 
rifle, for each of a little army of a half -mil- 
lion men, while the other investigations have 
brought home the fact that it is the French 
and British army that stand between us and 
the Kaiser's troops, and that it is England's 
battle-ships that hold the Kaiser's war fleet 
behind the Kiel Canal. It is the British 
bulldog that keeps the German rat in the 
Kiel hole. On one side of the American 
silver dollar we have written these words, 
"In God we trust," and on the other we 
should write these words, " And in Eng- 
land's battle-ships." 

Edmund Bukke's Wokds 
Burke once spoke of civilization as a con- 
tract between three parties, the noble dead, 
the living and the unborn. The English 
statesmen held that our fathers have a great 
stake in this republic. It could not be other- 
wise. Washington and Hamilton, Webster 
and Lincoln, who struck out the free insti- 
tutions of this country, are vitally interested 
in their preservation and their future. The 

I20 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

merchant who founds a great business, the 
educator who establishes the academy or 
college, the architect who rears some capital 
or cathedral, the patriot and soldier who 
gave their life-blood to preserve their institu- 
tions, the parents and teachers who have re- 
produced themselves in their children and 
pupils, — all these have a great stake in so- 
ciety. Of necessity, each Franklin or Edi- 
son follows with solicitude the tools invented 
for the redemption of men from drudgery. 
Are not the Pilgrim Fathers interested in 
the outcome of their ideas? Has the great 
Emancipator no regard for the black race 
whom he redeemed ? Can the husbandman 
lose all interest in the orchard and vineyard 
he has planted for the support of succeeding 
generations ? Little wonder that the Gothic 
legend represents the fathers drawing near 
to the battlements of heaven to watch every 
assault upon liberty in the plains beneath ! 
From time to time the illustrious souls, re- 
deemed out of the body, pluck the red roses 
from the tree of life, and fling them down 
upon those who are struggling on the plains. 
When the roses fall upon the arms of the 
enemies of liberty they turn to coals of fire, 
that burn the hands of tyrants and make 

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What the United States 

them drop the sword unsheathed to promote 
oppression. When the roses fall upon the 
gashes of those who fight for humanity they 
become medicines that heal all wounds. Our 
children, and our children's children to the 
last generation also have a great stake in 
this republic. Our own generation is at best 
a trustee, whose duty it is to safeguard the 
institutions won by our fathers, and then to 
hand them forward, unimpaired and greatly 
enriched, to the generations that come after 
us. God weaves the ages upon a loom. 
Civilization is a solid texture, that belongs 
to the noble dead, to the living, but chiefly 
to the unborn. Every motive, therefore, of 
reverence and loyalty to our fathers, and of 
affection for our children, bids us dedicate 
our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred hon- 
our to the overthrow of autocracy and mili- 
tarism, and the establishment upon abiding 
foundations of the institutions of our fathers. 

Our Obligation to England 
Because England has been fighting our 
battle for two and a half years, we are now 
not only fighting our own battle, but trying 
to repay in part our immeasurable debt to 
the motherland. Great Britain has been the 

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And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

mother of many republics ; all the harvest of 
our liberty came from seed corn gathered 
in England's harvest fields. Among Pilgrim 
Fathers who founded New England were 
men educated in Cambridge. We had our 
revolt against the autocracy of George the 
Third from the inspirations of Oliver Crom- 
well, John Pym and John Hampden. Boston 
owes a great debt to Sir Harry Yane, whose 
statue stands at the entrance of her Public 
Library. We borrowed our freedom of the 
press from John Milton's noble argument. 
Our Declaration and our Constitution are 
nothing other than the restatement, in legal 
form, of the noble visions that pursued the 
soul of John Milton all his life long. 

And now that England is steadily winning 
and gaining six battles and attacks out of 
seven, during the fourth year of the war, the 
time has come for the American people and 
government to ask themselves this question, — 
Shall we not do in the first year of our war 
the things that England did in the third year 
and the fourth ? — thus assuring our winning 
six times out of seven. At the beginning of 
this war, Britain's ammunition was provided 
by three government factories and a few 
auxiliary firms. " The first 100,000 men," 

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What the United States 

sneered at by the Kaiser as " Kitchener's 
contemptible little army," were pounded by 
fifty German shells for every one shell with 
which they could reply. Now England has 
over 5,000 factories turning out munitions. 
Her capacity for producing high explosives 
in October, 1917, was twenty-five times as 
great as in the autumn of 1915, while the 
expense is one-third. She is now producing 
25,000 tons of projectiles every week, and 
each new arsenal factory is built with the 
thought of turning them over to productive 
industrial companies when the war is over. 
Her cannons are roaring upon every front in 
Europe, as well as in the Balkans, in Pales- 
tine, in Persia and in Africa. 

She now has 400,000 automobile trucks, or 
lorries, in France and Belgium, and will turn 
out 20,000 airplanes during the next year. 
Her fleet has increased from 136,000 sailors 
to 400,000 ; and at last, thanks to the deep-sea 
bomb, for every slow and old ship Germany 
sinks, she has to lose a far more costly sub- 
marine. To-day England has 4,000,000 men 
on six fronts and three continents. She has 
not simply mobilized her army, but mobilized 
the entire nation, and is only beginning to 
exert her full power. 

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And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

The lesson for us, from England's experi- 
ence, is this : that every factory in the United 
States, now turning out luxuries, should be 
taken over by the government to turn out 
munitions ; that every loom and lathe, forge 
and hammer, every mine and forest and 
shipyard should be dedicated to this one 
task — of winning this war for humanity and 
liberty. History will doubtless say that 
during the first two and a half years "of this 
war America was like the priest and the 
Levite who passed by on the other side, 
leaving Belgium like the wounded man 
lying among thieves, while England was the 
Good Samaritan, glorious forever through her 
service, self-sacrifice and loyalty to her writ- 
ten pledges. We owe Great Britain and her 
colonies a debt of service because she placed 
her army and her navy between us and our 
enemy and preserved us. When, therefore, 
an occasional pro-German, who does not 
dare defend the Kaiser, stands on the street, 
and in his harangue vilifies Great Britain, 
we should remember that the Allied cause 
has three armies, Haig's, Petain's and Persh- 
ing's. Whoever vilifies one of the hosts is 
the enemy of all three. When General 
Grant found one of his aids chuckling over 

125 



What the United States 

tlie news of a defeat of Sheridan, Grant 
court-martialed the man, found him guilty, 
shot him at daybreak,— -an example to be 
commended with reference to any man who 
vilifies Great Britain or France with his lips 
or pen. In this crisis there are no German- 
Americans, — there are only Americans and 
traitors. The first duty of our government 
is to defend our transports, our soldiers and 
sailors, from all spies, American with their 
lips, but with hearts full of hatred for our 
Allies and our country. 

We Aee Also Fighting to Pay 
Our Debt to France 

Fighting to protect the institutions of our 
fathers and to safeguard democracy for our 
children, we are also fighting to expel in- 
vaders from France, as once France helped 
Washington expel thousands of German in- 
vaders from America. How black the sin 
of ingratitude ! What if some youth, poor 
and obscure, coming up to the great city to 
make his fortune, should gain his opportu- 
nity to climb at the hands of some noble 
merchant. And what if this benefactor, 
taking the orphan into his home, shares his 
treasure with the youth, builds manhood in 

126 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

the poor boy, opens to him the door to 
fortune and to fame. And what if, when 
the poor boy finally has a mansion of his 
own, with wealth, and honours, news should 
come that his now aged benefactor has fallen 
on evil days and been attacked by cruel 
enemies. Can any crime be blacker than 
for this strong man to send word to the one 
upon whose shoulders he had climbed up to 
place, saying, "I do not wish to enter into 
any entangling alliances with you in your 
distress, for I have learned neither to borrow 
nor to lend " ? 

In 1781 France, a kingdom rich and 
powerful, found the handful of American 
colonists in the condition of a boy, poor, 
friendless, obscure, and threatened by a 
powerful enemy. "Washington had no 
money, no guns, no powder, no shoes for 
his soldiers in the winter. At the moment 
when our fortunes were at the lowest ebb, 
France sent us her greatest admiral, with 
a fleet of two battle-ships, three destroyers, 
thirty-eight transports, and seven thousand 
soldiers, with muskets, powder, shot, shoes, 
clothing and medical supplies. She sent us 
Lafayette, heir to rich estates, with one of 
the largest private incomes in Europe, who, 

127 



What the United States 

with his fellow officers, joined the troops of 
Washington. He saw his Frenchmen fall 
side by side with the troops of Washington. 
When at length Cornwallis surrendered his 
sword to the Commander of our army, 
Lafayette shared in the ceremony. What 
treasure of lives and fortune France lavished 
upon this republic more than one hundred 
years ago! We owe France our generals, 
our admirals, our soldiers and sailors, our 
munitions, our physicians, our nurses, our 
admiration, our love, our lives and our 
sacred honour. 

The World's Love for France 
If Germany is the best hated nation in the 
world, so France is the most dearly loved 
country. From France we have our paint- 
ing at the hands of her artists, from France 
we have our sculpture at the hands of Rodin. 
From France we have fine literature and 
music ; from France we have the beautiful, 
organized into the clothes the people wear. 
But above all, France has given us the en- 
during things of the spirit. The whole his- 
tory of heroism holds nothing finer than the 
tales of French soldiers struggling unto blood 
and death to secure happiness and liberty for 

128 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

others. Where will you find a more glorious 
sentiment than this, that fell from the lips 
of the poilu in the trenches, — "We sleep 
in mud, we bathe in blood, but our souls, 
they dwell among the stars." Here is that 
young French girl, going to the station, the 
Garde du Nord, to meet her wounded hus- 
band, who had never seen his new-born babe. 
But the young fellow died while they lifted 
him out of the car. Putting the little babe 
down to the cheek that was becoming cold, 
the girl lifted her eyes unto God, and with 
streaming eyes exclaimed, "I am only his 
wife ! France is his mother ! " And here is 
that poilu home for his eight days' rest, who 
saw the broken-down hearse, with a poor 
little woman hidden under crepe, marching 
as the sole mourner; the soldier sprang 
up, rushed to the hearse, saw a crippled 
comrade who had been killed at the bat- 
tle of the Somme, and turned to bid all the 
men and women on the sidewalk fall into 
line, because a soldier of France was sleep- 
ing, and all Frenchmen were his lovers, and 
who carried the poor man in triumphal pro- 
cession in the midst of sorrowing hundreds 
to his final resting place. The French have 
added a new chapter to the history of 

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What the United States 

heroism. The Hun will never conquer 
France. Should a time ever come when the 
butchers have killed all save one French boy 
and girl, when the weapon is lifted against 
them, they will stand against the wall of the 
Pyrenees, and the last Frenchman might die, 
but he will never be conquered by the Huns. 

The Teibute of the Beitish 

Americans oftentimes marvel at the praise 
that the British and the French bestow upon 
the armies of the other. Each insists upon 
considering the other superior to himself. 
One August day, in a Paris restaurant, a 
young English captain, quiet, reserved, mod- 
est to a degree, was praising the French sol- 
diers and officers whom he had met. Having 
just returned from the front of Ypres and La 
Bassee he was so filled with admiration for 
the fortitude, the endurance, and the heroism 
of the French soldiers, that he sought in 
vain for words bright enough with which to 
describe their achievements. Asked for the 
reason of his eulogy, and his conviction as 
to the supremacy of the French, the British 
captain answered, " You must remember that 
the Frenchman is fighting for his native 
land, while England has never been invaded 

130 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

by the Huns." Then the captain went on to 
praise the British rifles, machine guns, their 
military tactics, and the skill of their sol- 
diers. "When my company march, they 
are so perfectly drilled that their one hun- 
dred right legs swing like the single stroke 
of a pendulum. I will put my men against 
the soldiers of the world. Still," he said, 
" so far as I now recall, no English division 
ever brought in at one time more than one 
fourth their number as prisoners." 

A Picture of the French Fight 
"But," added the captain, "look at tne 
French soldiers at Verdun. One had a hel- 
met, one a hat, some were bareheaded ; some 
had new rifles, some old rifles, and some only 
a bayonet and revolver. When they were 
within ten rods of the German trench they 
lifted up their bayonets and sent out their 
battle cry, and hearing the hoarse voices, 
the Germans flung away their guns, climbed 
out of their trenches, ran like rabbits and 
bellowed like bulls; that night when the 
French division came home for supper, they 
brought ten thousand Germans along with 
them. You can't beat the French — they are 
fighting for their native land." That is a 

131 



What the United States 

reason, but it is not the reason. The reason 
is this — the Frenchman counts himself dead 
already. If he survives to-day's battle, he 
says, The morrow will give me another 
chance to die for God and beautiful France. 
The Frenchman never knows when he is de- 
feated, and therefore he cannot be beaten. 
One day a lawyer from Paris came to the 
front to bring Jean a message from a cousin. 
" The Americans have come, the Latin Quar- 
ter is reviving, the shops are reopening, and 
your cousin oifers to take down the shutters 
that have been up for three years and try 
to make a little money to take care of you 
if you are wounded, and have it ready for 
you when you return." Jean shook his 
head, — he was not interested. He said that 
he never expected to return ; that his cousin 
must take the shop, that everything therein 
was hers; that he asked only to die for 
France. The lawyer could not reason with 
him, and so the attorney hastily wrote out 
a paper, giving the cousin full power to act 
as if the property were hers, and then the 
French soldier hurried back to the trenches, 
having: no time for even a farewell. If to- 
day every civilized city and country looks 
with contempt upon Germany, and thinks 

132 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

of her as a wild beast let loose to rend the 
white flesh of humanity, every country in 
the world hails France, and admires and 
loves her for her chivalry, her heroism, her 
fortitude and her faith. 

The Next Step 

In this critical hour national unity is be- 
come an imperative necessity. Men who 
have travelled up and down the country 
realize the intense patriotism of one city 
and section, and the apathy of another sec- 
tion. Always the explanation is to be found 
in the fact that some outstanding newspaper 
or public man has become the center of en- 
lightenment and patriotism or the reverse. 

As for the papers, the cost of the cable- 
grams, the expense of telegraphing news 
across the country into the South, the West, 
or the Pacific Coast cities, the high price of 
print paper, has all but destroyed the finan- 
cial resources of many papers, in towns west 
of the Alleghanies. But the flame of en- 
thusiasm is fed by the fuel of ideas. The 
men who sacrifice are the men who know. 
The time, therefore, would seem to have 
come for the government, during the period 
of the war, to see to it that the people in the 

133 



What the United States 

villages, rural districts, and remote towns, 
should receive the full facts, every morning, 
so that daily one hundred millions of people 
should be assembled in one vast speaking 
gallery, and rise to the news of the same 
victory, and resolve with one mind and one 
heart to defend humanity. All the millions 
must think as one, and feel as one, and save 
and serve and sacrifice, and have one resolve 
to back up our President in the pledge to 
make democracy safe for our earth. 

The Mobilizing of the Women 
To win this war our girls and women must 
join the world movement. The outstanding 
lesson of the first two years of the war for 
Great Britain and France is that the be- 
ginning of their victories came with the 
entrance of women into the war. The steel 
wedge splits the log, not alone by the sharp 
edge, but the thick head that crowds forward 
the cutting edge. The American army is the 
cutting edge, but the one hundred millions of 
people behind lend driving power to our regi- 
ments. There are three million women in 
Great Britain either in the munition factories 
or industries allied thereto. Every twenty- 
four hours they produce more small cartridges 

134 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

than all England did the first year of the war. 
Every two days they turn out more large 
cartridges than all England did the first year 
of this war. Every six days, with the help 
of expert men, they produce more heavy 
ordnance and cannon than all England did 
the first year of this war. These English 
women pour the molten steel, tool the shells, 
run the lathes, make the aeroplanes, mix the 
explosives, and they literally hand the shells 
to the British soldiers to aim the cannon. 
They are driving the munition trucks upon 
the streets of England and the road to 
France, they are sowing the fields, reaping 
the wheat, threshing the grain, and per- 
forming ten thousand tasks once given over 
to men. The daughters of professional men, 
bankers, manufacturers, as well as of the 
business classes, are helping to equip the 
soldiers at the front. If our government 
should to-morrow commandeer ten thousand 
luxury-making plants for munition factories, 
throw them open to millions of women, by 
next autumn we should be doing our part to 
help win this war. 

To-day the clouds are thick, but better 
days are coming. For a time it may be our 
lot to toil on in the wilderness, but soon or 

135 



What the United States 

late the pilgrim host will enter the Promised 
Land and hang out the signals of victory. 
Those who war for justice and humanity 
find that the stars in their courses fight with 
them, and their soldiers shall be fed on 
angels' bread. Truth is stronger than error, 
liberty is stronger than tyranny, justice is 
the genius of our universe, God is omnipotent, 
and at last, love and sympathy must prevail. 
In this faith we must strive on for a peace 
that shall defend frontier lines, vindicate the 
rights of little peoples and destroy militarism 
and autocracy. During the January snow- 
storms, that noble surgeon and poet, at the 
head of a hospital at Vimy Ridge, — Dr. now 
Sir Andrew Macphail — wrote me a letter 
which stayed my heart as the anchor holds 
the ship in time of storm. The ground was 
deep with snow. Many wounded men had 
been brought in from the trench. But at 
midnight, while the winter's wind flapped 
his tent, the physician wrote me thus : 

" This war is of God. To-day it is 
peace that is hell. The soldier's life is a 
life of poverty, obedience, self-sacrifice ; 
we know what the civilian's life is. But 
for the chastisement of this war, Berlin 
and Vienna, London and Paris would 

136 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

have descended into hell within three 
generations. I once spoke in your Plym- 
outh on the blessings of peace ; if ever 
again I have that privilege, I shall speak 
on the blessings of war. I never dreamed 
that men could be so noble. For three 
months I have slept on the stone ; for 
three months before that in a tent ; for six 
months I have not been in a bed ; but I 
have never been so happy. I have ac- 
quired the fine freedom of a dog, and 
like a dog, I wear a metal tag around 
my neck so that they may know to 
whom I belong when it happens that I 
can no longer speak. And never was a 
man engaged in a cause so noble. I have 
seen Belgium ; I have seen a lamb torn 
by the wolf ; I am on the side of the 
lamb. I know the explanations the 
wolf has to offer — they do not interest 
me. I only wish that you were here 
with me at this battle for your own 
good; for right here at this western 
front this war will be decided, just 
where all the great wars of history have 
always been decided. It is decided al- 
ready, but will take the enemy some time 
yet to find it out." 

Vision of a Just and Lasting Peace 
What does this noble scholar mean ? His- 
tory makes that meaning plain ! No wine 

137 



What the United States 

until the purple clusters are crushed. No 
linen until the flax is bleeding and broken. 
No redemption without shedding of blood. 
No rich soil for men's bread until the rocks 
are ploughed with ice glaciers and subdued 
with fire billows. Four forms of liberty 
achieved by our fathers, for which they paid 
over three thousand battle-fields, blood down. 
This war was not brought by God, but hav- 
ing come, let us believe that His providence 
can overrule it for the destruction of all war. 
When Germany is beaten to her knees, be- 
comes repentant, offers to make restitution 
for her crimes, then and not till then can 
this war stop. Autocracy too must go. 
There is no room left in the world for a 
kaiser or a sultan. The hangman's noose 
awaits the peasant murderer, and already 
the hemp is grown to twist into the noose for 
the royal neck. At all costs and hazards we 
must fight this war through to a successful 
issue. Our children must not be made to 
walk through all this blood and muck. The 
burden of militarism must be lifted from the 
shoulders of God's poor. Any state that 
will not forever give up war must be shut 
out of the world's clearing houses and 
markets through finance and trade. Geolo- 

138 



And Her Allies Are Fighting For 

gists tell us that the harbour of Naples, pro- 
tected by islands, was once the crater of a 
volcano like unto Yesuvius, but that God de- 
pressed that smoking basin until the life- 
giving waters of the Mediterranean streamed 
in and put out that fire. Oh ! beautiful em- 
blem of a new era, when God will depress 
every battle-field, and every dreadnought, 
and bring in the life-giving waters of peace. 
When we have so carried on this war as 
to end all wars, a golden age will come, and 
with it the Parliament of Mankind, the Fed- 
eration of the World, a little international 
army policing the land, a little international 
navy policing the seas, an international su- 
preme court deciding disputes between peo- 
ples. To this high end let our sons dedicate 
themselves. To this goal let all of us as 
parents, looking towards our best beloved, 
say, " My son he is ! God's soldier let him be ! 
I could not wish him to a fairer death." Let 
all our people say to the Kaiser and his War 
Staff, " You shall not skewer babes upon your 
bayonets ; you shall not crucify officers upon 
the trees ; you shall not nail young nuns to 
the doors of the schoolhouses ; you shall not 
violate the sanctities of infancy and old age ; 
you shall not mutilate the bodies of little 

139 



What the United States 

girls and noble women ; you shall not call 
that unspeakable butcher, the Sultan, a dear 
friend, and organize his soldiers for the 
assassination of the whole Armenian race; 
you shall not play fast and loose with your 
solemn treaties ; you shall not transfix man- 
kind with German bayonets ; you shall not 
crush the hopes of Gladstone, Lafayette and 
Lincoln. You shall not grind God's children 
beneath the iron heel of despotism. And so 
help us God, despite all your atrocities, gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, and for 
the people shall not perish from God's earth ! 



140 



IV 

Astounding Claims and Records 
from German Sources 



The Butcher's Charge 
In 1900 addressing his soldiers about to sail for 
Peking, the Kaiser gave them counsel. Later he 
repeated this in a little different language for the 
soldiers of August, 1 9 1 4 : " When you meet the 
foe you will defeat him. No quarter will be 
given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who 
fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as 
the Huns one thousand years ago under Attila 
gained a reputation, so may the name of Ger- 
many become known in such a manner in China 
that no Chinaman will ever again dare to look 
askance at a German." 

Kitchener's Charge 

" Be invariably courteous, considerate and 
kind. Never do anything likely to injure or des- 
troy property, and always look upon looting as a 
disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a 
welcome, and to be trusted ; your conduct must 
justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty 
cannot be done unless your health is sound. So 
keep constantly on your guard against any ex- 
cesses. In this new experience you may find 
temptations in wine and women. You must en- 
tirely resist both temptations, and, while treating 
all women with perfect courtesy, you should 
avoid any intimacy. 

" Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Hon- 
our the King. 

" Kitchener, Field- Marshal" 




IV 

Astounding Claims and Records 
from German Sources 

^YER and over again the German 
Chancellor and the Kaiser have de- 
clared that Germany is waging a defensive 
war, and never intended to annex Belgium. 
Shortly after the death of the Governor of 
Belgium a member of the Eeichstag pub- 
lished General von Bissing's memorandum, 
signed by its author. This man enjoyed to 
an unusual degree the Kaiser's confidence. 
In his last testament he declares that King 
Albert must be dethroned, dictatorship must 
be established, the properties of all Belgians 
who have fled must be confiscated, and a 
regime of blood and iron imposed, otherwise 
Germany has lost the war. " Our frontier 
must be pushed forward to the sea. We 
must retain all Belgium and link it up with 
the German sphere of power. The annual 
Belgian production of 23,000,000 tons of coal 
has given us a monopoly on the continent 

143 



Astounding Claims and Records 

which has helped us to maintain our vitality. 
If we do not hold Belgium, administer Bel- 
gium, and protect Belgium by force of arms, 
our trade and industry will lose the position 
they have won. Belgium, therefore, must be 
seized and held, as it now is, and as it must 
be in the future. It only remains for us, 
therefore, to avoid, during the peace nego- 
tiations, all discussion about the form of the 
annexation, and to talk only about the right 
of conquest. In view of our just and ruth- 
less procedure, the king of the Belgians will 
be deposed, and we can read in Machiavelli 
that he who desires to take possession of a 
country will be compelled to remove the 
king, even by killing him." 

Nothing can be more obvious, since Ma- 
chiavelli also says the burglar often must 
kill the householder, and Annas had to as- 
sassinate Jesus; but other murderers from 
the day of Socrates to Lincoln have been 
more skillful than von Bissing in announcing 
and defending their crimes. 

The Claims of the Kaiser's Family 
Some years ago, in 1856, Frederick Will- 
iam IY, a predecessor of the present reign- 
ing " All Highest," became a suitor in the 

144 



From German Sources 

courts of Missouri seeking to recover from 
the estate of a deceased postmaster a sum 
with which he had absconded to America. 
The royal plaintiff thus modestly described 
his status : " The plaintiff states that he is 
absolute monarch of the Kingdom of Prussia, 
and as king thereof is the sole government 
of that country ; that he is unrestrained by 
any constitution or law, and that his will, 
expressed in due form, is the only law of that 
country, and is the only legal power there 
known to exist as law." (King of Prussia v. 
Kuejpper's Admr. y 22 No. 551.) See Law 
Notes. 



Here follow a very few out of thousands 
of thoughts and records of fact, written by 
Germans, and still existing — mostly in print 
— originally designed to arouse the German 
war-spirit or to chronicle its achievements. 
And — as the old Roman put it — Litera 
seripta manet: the written record stands. 
Its revelations are undeniable. 

Germany Announces Her Plan to 
Exterminate the Belgians 

Let us bravely organize great forced mi- 
grations of the inferior peoples. Posterity 

145 



Astounding Claims and Records 

will be grateful to us. We must coerce them ! 
This is one of the tasks of war ; the means 
must be superiority of armed force. Super- 
ficially such forced migrations, and the pen- 
ning up of inconvenient peoples in narrow 
" reserves " may appear hard ; but it is the 
only solution of the race-question that is 
worthy of humanity. . . . Thus alone can 
the over-population of the earth be con- 
trolled; the efficient peoples must secure 
themselves elbow-room by means of war, 
and the inefficient must be hemmed in, and 
at last driven into " reserves " where they 
have no room to grow . . . and where, dis- 
couraged and rendered indifferent to the 
future by the spectacle of the superior energy 
of their conquerors, they may crawl slowly 
towards the peaceful death of weary and 
hopeless senility. — K. Wagner, JT., p. 170. 

Germany Announces Her Semi- 
Slave Empire 

[In the All-German Confederation which 
will comprise most of Europe] the Germans, 
being alone entitled to exercise political 
rights, to serve in the Army and Navy, and 
to acquire landed property, will recover the 
feeling they had in the Middle Ages of be- 

146 



From German Sources 

ing a people of masters. They will gladly 
tolerate the foreigners living among them, 
to whom inferior manual services will be 
entrusted.—^. U. M. 9 p. lfl. 

Geemany Peoposes to Disaem Othee 
Nations, as the Tueks Disaemed 
the aemenians 

The war must last until we have forced 
disarmament upon our enemies. There is a 
nursery rhyme which runs thus : 

Knife and scissors, fork and candle, 
Little children must not handle. 

Since the enemy States behave so childishly 
as to misuse their arms, they must be placed 
under tutelage. Morever, our enemies have 
acted so dishonourably that it is only just 
that rights of citizenship should be denied 
them. . . . When they can no longer bear 
arms, they cannot make any new disturb- 
ances. — 0. Siemans, W. L. K. D.,p. Ufl- 

The Geeman as Supeeman 
No nation in the world can give us any- 
thing worth mentioning in the field of 
science or technology, art or literature, 
which we would have any trouble in doing 

147 



Astounding Claims and Records 

without. Let us reflect on the inexhaustible 
wealth of the German character, which con- 
tains in itself everything of real value that 
the Kultur of man can produce. We under- 
stand all foreign nations ; no foreign nation 
understands or can understand us ! — Prof. 
Somoart, B. U. H.,p. 135. 

As the German bird, the eagle, hovers 
high over all the creatures of the earth, so 
also should the German feel that he is raised 
high above all other nations who surround 
him, and whom he sees in the limitless depth 
beneath him. — Prof. W. Sombart, H. U. B., 
p. US. 

We are indeed entrusted here on earth 
with a doubly sacred mission ; not only to 
protect Kultur . . . against the narrow- 
hearted huckster-spirit of a thoroughly cor- 
rupted and inwardly rotten commercialism 
(Jobbertum), but also to impart Kultur in its 
most august purity, nobility and glory to the 
whole of humanity, and thereby contribute 
not a little to its salvation. — Ein Deutscher, 
W.K.B.M.,$.]fi. 

He who does not believe in the Divine 
mission of Germany had better hang him- 
self, and rather to-day than to-morrow. — 
— B. 8. Chamberlain, D. Z., j). 17. 

148 



From German Sources 

The Test of the Teue German is 
the Absence of Humanitarianism 

Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to 
approve from the bottom of his heart the 
sinking of the Lusitania — whoever cannot 
conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty 
(ungeheure Grausamkeit) to unnumbered 
perfectly innocent victims . . . and give 
himself up to honest delight at this victorious 
exploit of German defensive power — him we 
judge to be no true German. — D. £aum- 
garten, D. R. S. Z., No. %4,p. 7. 

By steeping himself in military history, a 
German officer will be able to guard himself 
against excessive humanitarianism. — Laws of 
War on Land. 

We are not only compelled to accept the 
war that is forced upon us — but are even 
compelled to carry on this war with a 
cruelty, a ruthlessness, an employment of 
every imaginable device, unknown in any 
previous war. — D. Baumgarten^ D. R. S. Z. % 
No.^p. 7. 

Feom the Hymn of Hate 
We have all but one hate ; 
We love as one, we hate as one ; 
We have all but one foe — 

England ! 
149 



Astounding Claims and Records 

In the quarter-deck cabin, the banqueting 

room, 
Ship's officers sat at their friendly feast. 
Like a sabre blow, like the swing of a sail, 
One jerked his glass aloft for a toast. 
Curt and sharp as the catch of an oar, 
Three words he uttered : " To the Day ! " 

On whose score was the glass t 
They had all but one hate, 
Whom had they in mind ? 
They had all but one foe — 

England ! 

Bernhardi Blamed for Kevealing, 
in 1911, War Plans of the Kaiser 

" As I walked out, General von Bernhardi 

came into the room, an expert artilleryman, 

a professor in one of their war colleges. I 

met him the next morning and he asked 

me if I had read his book ' Germany in the 

Next War.' I said I had. He answered, 

'Do you know, my friends nearly ran me 

out of the country for that. They said, 

" You have let the cat out of the bag." I 

replied, "No, I have not, because nobody 

will believe it." What do you think of it ? ' 

I replied, ' General, I did not believe a word 

of it when I read it, but I now feel that you 

150 



From German Sources 

did not tell the whole truth ; ' and the old 
General looked actually pleased." 

That is why England and the United 
States were not prepared for this war. 
Their leaders and people supposed that Ger- 
many was bluffing and Germany banked 
upon the fact that nobody would take seri- 
ously her extraordinary claims and plans. 

Geemany's Revised Cheistmas Hymn 

" War On Earth, and Black Hate Towards 

All Men" 

England is our worst enemy, and we will 
fight her till we have overthrown her ! So 
may it please our Great Ally, who stands 
behind the German battalions, behind our 
ships and U-boats, and behind our blessed 
" militarism " ! — E. v. HeyJcing, D. W. E, 
p. $3. 

The German soul is the world's soul, God 
and Germany belong to one another. — " On 
the German God" by Pastor W. Lehmann, 
quoted in II. A. H., p. 83. 

Milk foe Geeman Babes 
(A German Song) 
" Oh, Germany, hate ! Slaughter thy foes 
by the millions and of their reeking corpses 

151 



Astounding Claims and Records 

build a monument that shall reach the 
clouds. 

" Oh, Germany, hate now ! Arm thyself 
in steel and pierce with thy bayonet the heart 
of every foe ; no prisoners ! Lock all their 
lips in silence; turn our neighbours' lands 
into deserts. 

" Oh, Germany, hate ! Salvation will come 
of thy wrath. Beat in their skulls with rifle- 
butts and with axes. These bandits are 
beasts of the chase, they are not men. Let 
your clenched fist enforce the judgment of 
God. 

" Oh, Germany, the time to hate has come. 
Strike and thrust, true and hard. Battal- 
ions, batteries, squadrons, all to the front ! 
Afterwards thou wilt stand erect on the 
ruins of the world, healed forever of 
thine ancient madness, of thy love for the 
alien." 

MOEE FEOM THE HYMN OF HATE 

What do we care for the Eussians and 

French I 
Shot against shot and thrust for thrust ! 
We love them not, we hate them not ; 
We guard the Vistula and the passes of the 

Vosges. 

152 



From German Sources 

We have but one single hate ; 

We love as one, we hate as one ; 

We have but one single foe, 
Whom you all know, whom you all know. 
He sits crouched behind the gray flood, 
Full of envy, full of fury, full of craft, full 

of guile, 
Set apart by waters that are thicker than 

blood. 
We wish to go before a seat of judgment 
To swear an oath, face to face, 
An oath of metal no wind can blow away, 
An oath for children and children's 

children. 
Hearken to the word, repeat the word, 
It rolls on through all Germany : 

We will not forbear from our hate. 



Testimony of Affidavits, and Diaries 
Taken from the Bodies of German 
Soldiers, as to the Atrocities 

(D. 25 -5b.) A boy with his hands cut off, 
mutilated by a German officer, because he 
was supposed to have laughed at this drunken 
brute. 

(D. h 5.) A Belgian babe, skewered upon 
the bayonet, driven through his stomach, 
with his little dead head and hands and legs 

153 



Astounding Claims and Records 

dangling as the German proudly carried it 
through the street of a village. 

(Alcove O. 60.) A Mother Superior cruci- 
fied by bayonets to the door of her school- 
house as punishment for scratching the face 
of an officer who was violating the person of 
a young nun. The burning alive of a man 
who defended his wife. 

(D. 92-93. Also D. 100-108.) Photographs 
of an aged priest, staked down to the ground, 
and used as a lavatory until he was dead ; 
photographs and affidavits of young girls 
with one breast cut off. 

(Affidavits in Alcove 867.) The dead body 
of a young girl nailed by her hands to the 
outside door of a cottage. She was about 
fourteen or sixteen years of age. 

(Page 21. Affidavits H-67.) " September 
14th. One hundred and eight inhabitants 
are stated to have been shot after they had 
dug their own graves. Innumerable houses 
have been destroyed. The population looks 
bitter and scowling." August 22nd, note- 
book of Private Max Thomas. "Our sol- 
diers are so excited, we are like wild beasts. 
To-day, destroyed eight houses, with their 
inmates. Bayonetted two men with their 
wives and a girl of eighteen. The little one 

154 



From German Sources 

almost unnerved me, so innocent was her ex- 
pression." 

(D. 10. 43.) In retreating from Laines eight 
drunken soldiers were marching through the 
street. A little child of two years came out 
and a soldier skewered the child on his bayo- 
net, and carried it away while his comrades 
sang. 

Withdrawing from Hofstade, in addition 
to other atrocities the Germans cut off both 
hands of a boy of sixteen. At the inquest 
affidavits were taken from twenty-five wit- 
nesses, who saw the boy before he died or 
just afterwards. 

(Affidavits D. 100-8) Passing through 
Haecht, in addition to the young women 
whom they violated and killed, a child three 
years old was found nailed by its hands and 
feet to a door. 

That all these atrocities were carefully 
planned in advance for terrorizing the people 
is proven by the fact that on the morning of 
August 25th the officers who had received 
great kindness from Madame Koomans, a 
notary's wife, warned her to make her escape 
immediately, as the looting and killing of all 
the citizens, men, women and children, was 
about to begin. 

155 



Astounding Claims and Records 

(D. 186.) " The captain served a requisi- 
tion upon all the farmers hereabouts, taking 
horses, oxen, wagons, milk and butter. These 
people are so ignorant that they did not 
know when he gave them false receipts and 
signed this name — Herr von Koepenick." 
Other peasants received receipts stating that 
in return for the goods that had been requi- 
sitioned by the German officers, the owner 
was to come to the German quartermaster 
and receive his pay in twenty strokes of a 
whip-lash. If all the diaries of the Germans 
now in the hands of the English, Belgian 
and French authorities were brought to- 
gether and published, they would make a 
small library, and the title would be " Con- 
fessions of Crime by German Soldiers." 

"August 19th. Halted and plundered a 
villa, as invariably the surrounding houses 
were immediately plundered; dined splen- 
didly, drank eleven bottles of champagne, 
four bottles of wine and six bottles of liquor." 

John YanderSchoot, 10th Company, 39th 
Infantry, 7th Army Corps. " August 19th. 
Quartered in the University. Boozed through 
the streets of Liege, lie on straw, booze in 
plenty, little food, so we must steal. We live 
like gods here in Belgium." 

156 



From German Sources 

K. Bartel — on crimes he had witnessed — as 
they were committed by his own officers 
and fellow privates. " Our men have shrunk 
morally below zero. Oct. 7th." 

Yager Otto Clepp, August 22nd, in Liege 
makes this entry: "Two of our regiments 
shot at each other; nine dead and fifty 
wounded. Keason for mistake not yet as- 
certained." 

There is a striking commentary on the 
German War Staff's Commission's statement 
that they shot the old men and women in 
Liege because of an attack by the people. 
This German officer's entry illustrates what 
doubtless happened many times. When the 
Germans were drunk, terrified by the sense 
of their own crimes and expecting the people 
to resist the cruelties, one German company 
turned and fired upon another. 

H. W. Heller. August 6th. " Friday at 
8 : 30 came the news that the English had 
landed in Belgium. We smashed everything 
immediately. One sees only burning houses 
and heaps of dead people and dead horses 
every three steps." 

Fritz Holman writes : " We are never 
thirsty here in France. We drink five and 
six bottles of champagne a day, and as to 

157 



Astounding Claims and Records 

under linen, we simply loot a house and 
change. God only knows what will happen 
unto us later on." 

Stephen Luther's diary. * ' Monday the 1 th . 
Marching via Laden. Villages friendly dis- 
posed, one of them bombarded in error. Mis- 
understandings occurred because our officers 
understand no French. There was terrible 
destruction; in a farmhouse saw a woman 
who had been completely stripped and who 
lay on burnt beams. How savage ! Ter- 
rible conditions in the destroyed houses." 
"August 24, 1914. In Ermiton we took 
about a thousand prisoners. At least five 
hundred were shot." 



Let this series be closed by a few trench- 
ant words from two of Germany's most 
famous poets, characterizing the Prussian 
nature that to-day controls all Germany 
(and neighbour Austria besides). The great 
Goethe was from Weimar, but the satiric 
Heine, from Diisseldorf — a Prussian, born. 

Pkussianism 
" The Prussians are cruel by nature ; civ- 
ilization will make them ferocious." — Goethe. 

158 



From German Sources 

"The Prussians . . . Nature made 
them stupid, science has made them wicked." 
— Heinrich Heine. 

" Christianity has to a certain extent soft- 
ened this brutal, belligerent ardour of the 
Teutons, but it has not been able to destroy 
it ; and when the Cross — the talisman that 
fetters it — shall be broken, then the ferocity 
of the old-time fighters, the frenzied exalta- 
tion of the Berserkers, whose praises are still 
sung by the poets of the North, will again 
burst forth. Then — and alas ! this day will 
surely come — the old war gods will arise 
from their legendary tombs and wipe the 
dust of ages from their eyes ; Thor will arise 
with his gigantic hammer and demolish the 
Gothic Cathedral." — Heinrich Heine. 



After the mephitic horrors of the German 
war-spirit, let us be refreshed by a breeze 
from the shores of America, and gratefully 
recognize a characteristic American flavour 
in the following address from Major-General 
Pershing to his troops in France. The re- 
port is from a French paper, and while, 
through its double translation, it may not be 
verbally exact, its fine spirit is evident. 

159 



Astounding Claims and Records 

" You are now in France, to expel an 
enemy that has invaded this beautiful land. 
Your first duty is to fight against this foe, 
and protect our Ally. You are here also to 
lift a shield above the poor and weak. You 
will be kind, therefore, to the aged and the 
invalid. You will be courteous to all women, 
and never have so much as an evil thought 
in your mind. You will be very tender and 
gentle with little children. You will do 
well, therefore, to forswear the use of all 
liquors. You will do your duty like brave 
men. Fear God. Honour your country. 
Defend liberty. God have you in His 
keeping." 



1 60 



V 

ILLUSTRATIONS PORTRAYING 
GERMAN ATROCITIES 




; ■.-. ' ' : :' ; ■- . ' '■■■•■■ ■■■■■ > ■■ 



GERMAN SOLDIER'S TOKEN 

Strike him dead! The Day of Judgment will not 
ask your reasons! " 



CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS AFLAME 

Imagination is not Germany's gift. . . . 
She cannot by any chance conceive how other 
races look upon her vandalism. Her own 
foreign secretary expressed it: " Let the neu- 
trals cease chattering about cathedrals. Ger- 
many does not care one straw if all the galleries 
and churches in the world were destroyed, 
providing we gain our military ends." — 
Pp. 48, 50. 



N. B. — -The cathedral of Rheims was never 
used by the French soldiers for any military 
purpose whatsoever. 




Copyright by Underwood & Undemvood, N . Y 



GERMAN MILITARY TACTICS 

The official Handbook for instruction and 
guidance says: " By steeping himself in mil- 
itary history, an officer will be able to guard 
himself against excessive humanitarian no- 
tions." — These four citizens were murdered 
because they would not betray the guardian- 
ship of their bank. — Page 23. 



A GUILTY HOME GUARD 

This man defended his home and the honour 
of his young wife against two German officers. 
They literally carved his limbs into bits, and 
mutilated his body in ways that men only 
speak of, and then in whispers. When the 
German marauder breaks into the French or 
Belgian home, its owner of course loses his 
rights : All belong to the brave conquerors. 



A PRINCELY WEAPON 

The German firebrand is a perforated iron 
bulb, filled with asbestos cloth absorbing 
about a teacupful of petrol. Mounted on a 
wooden handle it is fired, and hurled into a 
building for conflagration. With this Prince 
Eitel Frederick, after looting, personally burned 
the Chateau of Avricourt, where he had quar- 
tered for months. — Page 45. 



DIARY OF EITEL ANDERS 

" We arrived at the town of Wandre. The 
inhabitants without exception were brought 
out and shot. They all knelt down and 
prayed, but that was no ground for mercy. 
A few shots rang out and they fell back into 
the green grass and slept forever. It is real 
sport." — Page 34. 



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RUINS OF GERBEVILLER 

This once lovely village of Gerbeviller, is 
now called Gerbeviller the Martyred. In a 
rage of fury because of his enforced retreat 
before a French army, of two-thirds in num- 
ber of his own troops, General Clauss looted 
this little city and massacred about one hun- 
dred of its people. Among the slain were 
fifteen very aged men, including the Mayor 
and his secretary, there being no young or 
middle-aged men left in the town who could 
be killed. Out of 475 houses, twenty at most 
were left habitable. — Page 37. 




■ , . . :.■:,;:,■ ■ ",■ ; 







PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WRECKINGS 

Two examples of wanton, unmilitary de- 
struction. Above, a scene in Nomeny (De- 
partment of Meurthe-et-Moselle) , and below, 
the splendid great Cloth Hall of Ypres. 
The former was simply the hell-blast of Ger- 
man passage; the latter, a distinct intention 
to destroy by fire a famous and beautiful 
edifice, made a target for the heaviest guns, 
with no remotest military reason — except 
" f rightfulness." 



MUTE WITNESSES 

The full extent of the German atrocities 
committed on a battle line six hundred miles 
in length, and extending from the English 
Channel to the Swiss frontier, can never be 
known. More than one hundred thousand 
people are simply reported as " missing," 
other multitudes were burned or thrown into 
pits. Only in towns from which the German 
armies hurriedly retreated were inquests pos- 
sible, and in those towns affidavits were pre- 
pared and photographs of the mutilated bodies 
taken. After the German troops had passed 
out of the village or city, it became possible 
for the village school-teacher, priest or banker, 
the aged women and the children to creep out 
of pits, the caves in the fields, or the edge of 
the woods, where they had been hiding, and 
return to survey the scene of desolation be- 
hind them. The opposite page shows victims 
in the little town of Andenne, where more than 
300 civilians were massacred. 



CATHEDRAL OF ST. MARTIN 

The city of Ypres, in the intensest zone of 
conflict, has suffered much. The ancient 
Cathedral, of the XIII Century, on the site of 
an edifice of the XI, stately and impressive 
with its magnificent rose window in the choir, 
is now unroofed and its fine interior a heap of 
stones mournfully guarded by the remaining 
pillars and broken walls. The great altar- 
piece of St. Martin on his white steed still 
presides over the ruins of the high altar. It 
is a ghastly scene. 




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HECKMAN 

BINDERY INC. 



AUG 89 

N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 




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